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Thread: News - Revamped Apple MacBook Pros feature secret GPU sauce

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    News - Revamped Apple MacBook Pros feature secret GPU sauce

    Turns out Apple's automatic graphics switching technology isn't NVIDIA's Optimus - it's something entirely new and interesting.
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    Re: News - Revamped Apple MacBook Pros feature secret GPU sauce

    Sounds a bit hacky/shoddy... Optimus looked like a better technology IMHO.

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    Re: News - Revamped Apple MacBook Pros feature secret GPU sauce

    But they do need to try and justify the £300 premium, a nice case an magnetic power cable just isn't enough!

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    Re: News - Revamped Apple MacBook Pros feature secret GPU sauce

    I guess if you can drive the display output from either graphics processor, exchanging framebuffers and other state information between them needn't be that hard, so long as you aren't trying to do it lots of times per second.
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    Re: News - Revamped Apple MacBook Pros feature secret GPU sauce

    Quote Originally Posted by Percy1983 View Post
    But they do need to try and justify the £300 premium, a nice case an magnetic power cable just isn't enough!
    Don't forget the backlit keyboard ! (actually a useful feature)
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    Re: News - Revamped Apple MacBook Pros feature secret GPU sauce

    Quote Originally Posted by mikerr View Post
    Don't forget the backlit keyboard ! (actually a useful feature)
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    Re: News - Revamped Apple MacBook Pros feature secret GPU sauce

    This sounds horrible!

    extra 30 min? Where the hell did that number come from, my [citation needed] sense is tingling.

    The idea of switching this in software is incredibly backwards because it limits the options one has to switch components of the actual chip to a simple on or off.

    I'm not keen on these switching graphics anyway, I like the sony approche best because they give you a clear switch, if you've got it set to stamina and something asks for the 330, guess what, its going to be told no (and probably die in a horrible un-handled exception or error code the dev team never anticipated) the idea of having this in software just doesn't seam as good.
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    Re: News - Revamped Apple MacBook Pros feature secret GPU sauce

    Would it not be easier to clock down the nvidia gpu to really slow speeds and lower the voltage substantially (introduce quite an aggressive form of intel speedstep for the gpu). Perhaps even power down half the gpu memory if it is not needed.

    Adding a second graphics card into the mix seems like a really backwards way of dealing with the 'power hungry' problem.

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    Re: News - Revamped Apple MacBook Pros feature secret GPU sauce

    Well yes and no, if you think of it as having a cost for the switch, in terms of constant energy, having just two switches one for each GPU is more efficient than having 1,000 switches for each different part of the GPU to turn off.
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