Video Cards on a Mac Book Pro

Whatever you want to talk about, but keep it clean
Post Reply
pbacot
Posts: 364
Joined: Wed Oct 03, 2012 2:27 am
OS: MacOSXMojave
SketchUp: 2019

Video Cards on a Mac Book Pro

Post by pbacot » Fri Jan 11, 2019 8:20 pm

A new / used laptop has been proposed to me with "AMD Radeon R9 M370X with 2.0GB GDDR5 memory, plus an Iris Pro 5200 with 1.5GB shared memory"

Anything wrong with this, off the cuff, for SketchUp, Photoshop, or Twilight?

(I don't know what shared memory means--I can ask the tech guy who's putting this together, I'm sure)

Thanks.
Last edited by pbacot on Sat Jan 12, 2019 2:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

Fletch
Posts: 12897
Joined: Fri Mar 20, 2009 2:41 pm
OS: PC 64bit
SketchUp: 2016-2023
Contact:

Re: Video Cards on a Mac Book Pro

Post by Fletch » Fri Jan 11, 2019 10:49 pm

A three year old graphics card with 2Gb video RAM doesn't sound overwhelmingly impressive. But yes, for SketchUp/Twilight it's adequate. It's rated here as roughly equivalent to Gefore 860M which is a pretty good graphics card for laptops.
4Gb video RAM would be better for general performance, especially for new Adobe Creative suite programs.

Iris Pro 5200 with shared memory means that you have a second (basic/lower end) graphics card built into the CPU which shares memory with the CPU. This sounds fancy, but is not helpful in high-end graphics work.

However - theoretically you could set some programs to function off the Iris graphics processor while you utilize the "real" Radeon graphics card for the heavy duty stuff.

pbacot
Posts: 364
Joined: Wed Oct 03, 2012 2:27 am
OS: MacOSXMojave
SketchUp: 2019

Re: Video Cards on a Mac Book Pro

Post by pbacot » Fri Jan 11, 2019 11:32 pm

Thank you. My current laptop has " NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB". MacBooks have "automatic graphics switching". Maybe the two cards shown here are similar to the set up I have but better cards. It seems that on these machines, you turn "graphics switching" off in order to use the better card only (while plugged in to power) and the switching saves energy otherwise.

Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 19 guests