AMD has revealed what we really want to know about Apple’s new lineup of 15-inch MacBook Pro notebooks. The Polaris-based GPUs are the Radeon Pro 450, Radeon Pro 455, and Radeon Pro 460 – all of which are based on the 14nm FinFet process technology and have never been seen before
The Radeon Pro 450 GPU comes standard with the 15-inch MacBook Pro and features 2GB of GDDR5 memory. It is said to come with a maximum compute performance of 1 TFLOPS and memory bandwidth is rated at 80GBps. This GPU also comes with 10 compute units, which amounts to 640 stream processors.
Next is the slightly more powerful Radeon Pro 455 GPU. Similar to its less powerful sibling, the Radeon Pro 455 also has a 2GB framebuffer (VRAM) along with similar memory bandwidth of around 80GBps. The upgrade that can be seen in this GPU would be its compute units count of 12 (768 stream processors) as well as its peak compute performance, which is rated at 1.3 TFLOPS.
The most powerful powerful GPU one can opt for with their brand new 15-inch MacBook Pro would be the Radeon Pro 460, which has twice the memory capacity of both the aforementioned Radeon Pro GPUs (4GB GDDR5) as well as 1.86 TFLOPS of peak compute performance. In addition, this GPU also features a mouth-watering compute unit count of 16, which is around 1024 stream processors. That said, like its younger brothers, the Radeon Pro 460 still comes with a memory bandwidth speed of 80GBps.
According to Apple, its new 15-inch MacBook Pros are now 130% better in rendering 3D graphics and about 57% more efficient in video editing when compared to the previous GPU used in the ‘old’ 15-inch MacBook Pro. Meanwhile, the company also claims that gaming performance has risen to about 60%, thanks to the new Radeon Pro GPU – Apple did not mention which Radeon Pro GPU was used for this comparison. The numbers are not entirely impressive when one remembers that the 2015 MacBook Pro only ran on Intel Iris graphics.
The new 15-inch MacBook is clearly more powerful than its predecessor, but how do the graphics cards compare with the Radeon RX 460? One can clearly see that these Radeon Pro GPUs are nowhere nearly as good as the RX 460 based on specifications alone. The RX 460 has a peak performance of 2.2 TFLOPS; despite having 12 compute units compared to the Radeon Pro’s 14. In other words, it looks like some sacrifices were made to keep size and weight down.
So, while Apple claims that its new 15-inch MacBooks are significantly better in the graphics department, one still shouldn’t consider getting them for the sole purpose of gaming. After all, there are plenty of affordable and more powerful gaming notebooks out there that would put the gaming performance of Apple’s new MacBooks to shame. But then people aren’t actually buying these things to play games.
(Source: Radeon Creators)
