Macbook Pro Video Card memory

anemoneanemone
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
Hi, i am debating between buying the low end or the middle macbook pro.. Is there a big difference in 128mb and 256 mb of video ram? Is 200mhz more in cpu, 40 gbs, and 128mbs of more ram worth 500 dollars? I was thinking about going out to get one tomorrow. My laptop is 5 years old now and it is getting slow and hot.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    easyceasyc Posts: 69member
    Diddo... Im looking at buying the new MBP and I plan on playing recreational games, HL2, warcraft 3, and dawn of war on occasion, not for anything hardcore. The notebook is going to be more for school, and photo and video editing so would the jump in GPU be needed?
  • Reply 2 of 5
    idenitiideniti Posts: 1member
    I have the same question, but the opposite situation of EasyC... I'm not really looking into playing games, but plan to use the MBP for photo/video editing. I will mainly use it for Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut Pro, and some After Effects, but I won't be using it much for Motion or any 3D Apps like Maya. The impression that I always got was that video cards are pretty much up to snuff for "2D" apps like Photoshop/Illustrator and won't really see much difference in performance with better video cards. When it comes to 3D animation and games, that's where the extra processing/memory comes to use... Is there any truth in this or am I waaaay off? Would Final Cut Pro see a benefit between the 128mb and the 256mb? Any insight would be greatly appreciated!
  • Reply 3 of 5
    pbpb Posts: 4,255member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Anemone View Post


    Hi, i am debating between buying the low end or the middle macbook pro.. Is there a big difference in 128mb and 256 mb of video ram? Is 200mhz more in cpu, 40 gbs, and 128mbs of more ram worth 500 dollars?



    The VRAM difference is not going to show up in normal use. There are however situations where it is advisable to have as much as you can get. For this and the other points, it is up to you to decide according to your usage and how long you keep a computer if it is worth paying so much more. Judging from what you say about your old laptop, it seems that you tend to keep them for a long time. If so and if I was you, I would rather max up the new machine.
  • Reply 4 of 5
    oxidoxid Posts: 19member
    Hmm



    This is my opinion:



    First the 128 ram won't be a problem when playing games like half-life 2, call of duty, most steam games, tomb raider. But you will have difficutlies playing future games like Timeshift, Crysis, Maybe Next-gen content from Tomb raider.

    But this all depends on how mac uses its memory, some laptops with 2Gig ram and a powerful graphics card allow shared memory also. But shared memory is always slower than the Video GDDR3. If mac allows shared memory on his graphics card than you'll be able to play games who require more than 128mb Vram. If not you'll have to play it in medium graphics.



    500$ is much tho for that lousy gfx bump. who needs the extre 200mhz? and a hdd bump only costs about 100$ or less. So it's expensive.



    In the future external graphic cards will be released, in fact it'l be more an external bay for a PCI Express card. That is already released and called Magma ExpressBox, but it's still pricy because Magma isn't a big company and it's the first product of it's kind. MSI had a vision called "luxium" which is the same but with external audio integrated in their box. They released a concept but not the actual thing.

    This is all very nice because within 6 or 10 months we will be able to use 8800GTX on a macbook pro external through our ExpressCard interface.



    BUT, the big problem is: GFX card like the 8800GTX use PCI Express x16, and the Expresscard slot on the laptops ar directly connected to a PCI Ex x1 slot. Cards like the

    7300GT don't really need a x16 slot, they would operate very well on a x1 slot. Now the question remains, does cards like 8800GTX really need the x16 slot? if yes, a new Expresscard slot need to be released which will be directly connected to a internal x16 slot, if no the x1 will still be enough.



    So, Or, you spend 1999 dollars on a mbp 128vram and you wait for those interfaces, or you sell it at 1599 dollars in january and buy the next revision model at 1999$, which is a loss of 400, and you'll be up to date at that time.



    Or you spend 2499 on a mbp 256vram and you stay with it.



    I rather choose the first option I see it like an update, like paying 400$ a year to stay up to date, like buying a new GFX card.

    I could do that with the 2499 model but I don't have that much money right now, And in belgium the 2.2 MBP costs 1747 euro's with student discount.





    Greetings

    Oxid
  • Reply 5 of 5
    bobmarksdalebobmarksdale Posts: 744member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Anemone View Post


    Hi, i am debating between buying the low end or the middle macbook pro.. Is there a big difference in 128mb and 256 mb of video ram? Is 200mhz more in cpu, 40 gbs, and 128mbs of more ram worth 500 dollars? I was thinking about going out to get one tomorrow. My laptop is 5 years old now and it is getting slow and hot.



    The lower end one should be fine. The amount of VRAM isn't everything, and the new GPU updates are fairly intense even though they stayed with 128.
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