But will those 0.3 ghz make any real world difference? Performance or even in render time, what would be the actual increase?
Shoulf I get a retina macbook pro?
cgbeige
#22
it makes a difference if you render a lot. Hard to say for sure but 0.3GHz for four hyperthreaded cores could probably shave 5-8 seconds off of a minute-long render. That adds up.
ThE_JacO
#25
Keep scrolling, look at the 48h later one 
About half the chronicled attempts went HORRBILY wrong, plus I don’t mind some antiglare given the light in the room I use it in when I do colour work (the colour of the u2711 is spectacular, easily on par with some monitors over twice the price we use at work, with a real 12bit LUT).
It’s just it has too coarse a grain for the ppi of the monitor and it can get a bit brutal with some fonts and size combinations, which wouldn’t be a problem if all apps out there would respect, or even have options, to change them, but some don’t (IE: ZBRush all-custom widgets) anyway…[b]
[/b]
ThE_JacO
#26
About half the ultra thins out there made the same decision, allegedly for the cooling or reduced footprint in the internal layout.
The remaining half of the ultra thins, however, proved it to be absolute BS meant for the laptops to obsolesce (and trigger a new purchase) faster, and to sell the upgrades at cut throat prices.
So, allegedly, their excuse is cooling. In truth, it’s greed
Given they are far from the best cooled laptop for its Wattage per SqI, and beaten by similar or better ratios, they are just trying to sucker you for more money.
It is a sexy piece of hardware that has a large chunk of market by the balls though, so I can’t really blame them, if I was them I would probably make the same call
technokill
#28
Alright, Ill try to grab both RAM and CPU then. Seems reasonable.
Hey, anyone ever experienced bootcamp in a retina mbp? Can windows handle the resolution?
Also, should I expect the overall feel of using 3ds max in bootcamp a bit clumsy?
tuna
#30
Don’t forget there’s no graphics switching in Windows on the MBPr, and the windows/command keys are flipped around, which is really annoying.
technokill
#31
What are the exact implications of that no graphics switching thing? If it means it’ll always run on discrete graphics, I dont think it will be an issue as Im sure 3ds max wouldnt handle integrated anyways.
ThE_JacO
#32
It usually means the intel coprocessor will be shunned, if it even gets recognized, and that only the AMD M will be used. It also throttles power not as well as native does.
Parallels doesn’t have the issue, but you are running a virtual machine at that point and not really an independent boot with a thin wrapper to the EFI. In some cases that’s convenient, other times the trade-off will be more than you are willing to pay.
Depending on apps it will make little to no difference some times, to a noticeable but slight loss of performance in other cases. Depends how much the app is offset by better performance in windows (which Maya in example tends to have videocard wise, not to mention the availability of VP2 DX11 only in windows), even uses the GPU (IE: ZBrush cares bugger all for it), or actually runs well and natively on Mac (I imagine Modo and C4D in example might see a drop in performance, but I’m guessing here).
cgbeige
#33
ya, the general rule is that Windows is faster for GPU but most apps prefer OS X for actual render speeds, with mental ray being the most painful example (Windows is pretty much owned by OS X and Linux).
tuna
#34
It will indeed always use the discreet NVidia gpu, which will eat up battery much faster and will be generally a tad hotter. Basically you might start seeing that your battery life is almost half that in Windows than OSX. (temps difference at idle probably won’t be noticeable)
cgbeige
#35
but one thing that you should keep in mind is that the Geforce GPU in the retina MacBook Pro is officially supported in CG apps under OS X, where it’s not supported in Windows. You have to get a mobile Quadro for that. So, there is a much greater likelihood that you’ll see terrible performance in Maya with a Kepler Geforce under Windows because Nvidia doesn’t care to support it or pro OpenGL apps.
A lot of reports are going around about bad performance with Kepler cards like the 680 in Maya under Windows.
technokill
#36
Nah, for sure Ill use maya/zbrush with OSX. As you guys said, better render performance and supported nvidia graphics.
My only concern was 3ds max really, but I guess the issues will stay within the battery power domain right? Or even with 3ds max ill run into problems due to windows lack of support?
ThE_JacO
#37
You’ll be fine, and even if it’s not officially supported the videocard will do perfectly fine on windows too once you hit the right drivers/settings combo.
Once you bootcamp it you are running windows natively, and the 6xxM do perfectly fine in Maya (first person experience).
Bootcamp is a bootloader with a thin translation layer for what windows didn’t support (which was much when it started, not so much now), not some black magic virtualized box. If you get windows up and running with everything detected and configured properly it’s exactly like running native, the hardware that matter for DCC is all rather common/stock stuff.
cgbeige
#38
don’t bother with Bootcamp for CG apps. I run Max with Nitro graphics in Parallels Desktop and it’s fine. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to do that full time but it’s fine if you just need to fire it up to convert a .max model to .fbx or something. I wrote a review of Parallels Desktop 8 and VMWare Fusion 5 and covered CG apps in Windows and Linux:
http://arstechnica.com/features/2012/09/parallels-desktop-8-and-vmware-fusion-5-pro-review-showdown/
just checked that again and you probably want to read the Parallels Desktop 7 review to get an idea of what 3D app performance is like in Windows 7 (I only talked about Win 8 above and both apps were flaky with 3D in Win 8):
technokill
#39
Well I wasnt thinking about only minor things with 3ds max, but whole little projects. I guess parallels wont ever be better than bootcamp for that right?