MacBook Pro Retina: over the edge of your video card

"All is not gold that glitters" . The resolution of a display is not a parameter as aseptic , an end in itself, an absolute value that depends only on the display as many of us might think, is not so! It all depends on the underlying hardware, we must always reckon with it, and also the resolution of the display depends primarily on one component , as well as the display technology itself, of course: the graphics card , a component pushed almost beyond the limit of its potential in these new MacBook Pro Retina .

 

These new laptops fitted with an internal onboard video Intel HD 4000 NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M flanked by the unit to which is delegated the task of managing the now  famous resolution of 2880 x 1800 pixels . AnandTech  review has developed a technique that shows how much these two pieces of hardware in the new MacBook Pro are pushed beyond the limit , in fact, just think that already handle a resolution of 1920 × 1200 would be a daunting task even for desktop GPUs.

Using suitable software tools AnandTech has decided to "see deeper" and found that with a resolution of 2880 x 1800 pixels on the new MacBook Pro Retina, most interactions are fluid, but things change when you try to do a zoom rather than scrolling a web page, in these case frames per second drop dramatically below 30 . Just for comparison, in the 2011 MacBook Pro to do the same operations will be safely above 50 frames per second .

The second thing the guys at AnandTech should improve slightly in Mountain Lion with the new Core Animation , though, as we have stressed several times, we are already beyond the limits of the underlying hardware. They have played around with the Developer Preview is currently available and the results are not quite satisfactory, in fact - see image in the opening article - the above operations are performed at about 20 frames per second.  by