A quick search throws up numerous 15-inch laptops around the $1,500 mark, which have much more powerful graphics cards, and more RAM and storage to boot.

Things get worse when you compare the $2,000+ laptop to other 15-inch Windows laptops, most of which tend to be designed for performance. Higher resolution needs a more powerful graphics card to push all those extra pixels, so to do any gaming on the new Pro, you’ll need to lower the settings or the resolution. That’s a problem, because the 15-inch MacBook Pro’s display is a much higher resolution than 1080[.

Looking at the benchmarks of that card, it should mean acceptable performance running something like Photoshop, easy playback of 4K video, or gaming at good settings, but only at a 1080p resolution. But just by comparing some basic specs, we know that performance should be similar to or a little worse than the GTX 965m graphics card, as found in the new Surface Book and other portable laptops. Since the cards are brand-new, we don’t have a sense for how they’ll perform in the real world quite yet. They’re all available in different configurations of the 15-inch MacBook Pro, all use AMD’s new Polaris architecture, and all run on 35W or less.ĪMD says that the new cards “are designed specifically for today’s makers – the artists, designers, photographers, filmmakers, visualizers and engineers that shape the modern content creation era.” That’s a nice way of saying that they’re not very powerful. There’s three new cards, the Pro 450, Pro 455, and Pro 460.

Change graphics card in macbook pro