Apple Bumps NVIDIA for AMD on Refreshed MacBook Pros

With Apple’s refreshed MacBook Pro line-up, a lot is brought to the table. At the very least, there are faster processors, Intel’s Thunderbolt technology, FaceTime going HD and more. But, there was another introduction that I didn’t immediately notice… AMD Radeon graphics. That’s right… it looks like NVIDIA got the boot, and given the rock-solid performance of GeForce, we’re rather surprised.

If there’s one thing that can be said about Apple, it’s that it never chances anything, so its decision to go with AMD had to have had a good deal of thinking behind it. Typically for me, I”ve always found AMD’s Unix-derived drivers to be less-than-stellar from a stability standpoint, while NVIDIA’s has been about as stable as can be. Could it be that AMD has been putting more effort into its Apple drivers than its Linux drivers? Great question, and one I’m sure would be impossible to get answered.

Assuming that the drivers on AMD’s graphics are “perfect” on Apple, what caused the company to give NVIDIA the boot? After all, NVIDIA’s products were already comfortably in place. What exactly gave AMD the edge this go-around?

It could be a number of things, but the top of the list might be the fact that Apple’s catching onto the fact that NVIDIA is no longer the king of graphics and that AMD’s Radeon cards great competition. But buck for buck, both NVIDIA and AMD have great offerings, so it seems likely that the real reason behind the switch-over is that AMD’s graphics tend to be a little less power-hungry than NVIDIA’s, and on workstation notebooks, that’s rather important.

In a blog post, AMD’s CEO Nigel Dessau posts about the success of its graphics products, and states that thanks to the inclusion of its latest GPUs, MacBook Pros have experienced a performance boost of about 3x, and for gaming and workstation-use alike, the Radeon cards deliver. Nigel’s comments also lead us to believe that Apple might be taking the gaming thing a little more seriously as well.

I think AMD is deserving of a “congrats” here, because bumping NVIDIA out of Apple couldn’t have been a small feat. It’s not one that NVIDIA’s too happy about either, I’m sure. I do hope NVIDIA can strike back with more power-efficient parts, though, because we need this thriving competition to continue.

If there’s an unfortunate point to all of this, it’s that as usual, the GPU offerings in the latest MacBook Pros aren’t exactly worth getting too excited over. The $2,500 model features a Radeon HD 6750M, which as far as graphics go, is just a smidgen under “mid-range”. It would have been nice to see something with a little more oopmh, such as an HD 6830, but perhaps gaming isn’t really a big focus of MacBook Pro users.

For graphics-intensive applications, the 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro models automatically switch to new high-performance AMD Radeon graphics processors. With up to 3x the performance of the previous models,3 they let you see more frames per second in 3D games, or work on HD video projects with more speed and responsiveness than before.