[Grall]

Daaaayyyuummm... This thing's secksy!

220 DPI, 2800*1800 pixel high-contrast screen, dual thunderbolt, all solid-state, i7 quadcore CPU, 1600MHz RAM, 25% thinner than regular Macbook Pro... And that hardware just looks fabulous.

The thought that went into the design of the thermal system for example, it's beautiful.

Of course, the entry price's 2200 dollars. The presenter at WWDC didn't dare to reveal the price of the fully configured 16GB, 2.7GHz i7 quad core with 16GB of 1600MHz RAM and 768MB SSD...

[Raqia]

Doesn't seem like the Intel 4000 or the GT650 has enough muscle to power anything but the GUI at native resolutions. Might wait a gen or two before I consider it.

[Pressure]

iFixIt have done their usual disassembly and this bad boy does pack a lot in such a small package!

Pure, unadultered, PCB-pr0n heh.

A shame I have absolutely no need for a portable computer at this point.

This is definitely the way forward for notebooks, although they aren't really user-serviceable, a compromise the majority of buyers are willing to take.

[Scott_Arm]

The GPU is not really enough for that display if you want to play games, even though upscaling really isn't that huge a deal if you wanted. But the GPU is plenty powerful enough for doing all the photo, video and CAD type stuff that mac professionals are known for. There are a lot of advantages to high resolution outside of games. That said, the price is very steep and I'm not one of the people that has use for it.

[Mize]

Really? Depends upon the game.

from engadget:

Paired with those quad-core chips is 8GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M Kepler unit with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. Also on tap is integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics, the hotter of the two GPUs toggle on when the situation demands. To create such a scenario, we installed one of the hottest games of the moment, Diablo III, and cranked it up to full resolution and full graphical details. We did, however, make one exception: anti-aliasing. When you're running at 2880 x 1800, there's no real need.

We were quite happily surprised to see the frame rate hovering between 25 and 30 fps as we explored a few towns and crawled a few dungeons -- perfectly playable at an obscene resolution. Turning it down to something a little more reasonable, 2048 x 1280, netted 40 to 45 fps and running at a relatively mundane 1280 x 800 delivered frame rates over 70. This, then, is a quite passable gaming machine.

[Scott_Arm]

Interesting. I read some reviews of that 650M with Battlefield 3 and other new games, and the frame rates were very low. Maybe I'm remembering the information wrong.

[Mize]

Originally Posted by Scott_Arm

Interesting. I read some reviews of that 650M with Battlefield 3 and other new games, and the frame rates were very low. Maybe I'm remembering the information wrong.

Well mid-20 fps on BF3 is low! Diablo3? Not so bad.

[Albuquerque]

If my eyes weren't complete shite, I'd be very very interested in making one of these my next laptop purchase... The screen is pure distilled awesome, and the reported performance is quite decent IMO for the resolutions we're talking about.

[Grall]

My eyes have gotten sort of run-down these days as well, but I can still see aliasing and stuff on my screen pretty easily. It only has 105dpi panel rez though, somewhat higher than other popular desktop monitors but it can't touch the new Macbook screen.

[shiznit]

When you beef up the regular 15" to similar specs the price is almost the same, so it's actually not a bad value, relatively speaking. I am really considering selling my 2011 13" Air for one of these, but I'm worried it will take a while for most apps to properly support the display.

[Scott_Arm]

Originally Posted by Mize

Well mid-20 fps on BF3 is low! Diablo3? Not so bad.

Mid 20fps at what res and what setting? I wouldn't really care about upscaling from a lower res if it could handle the game at normal to highest settings. Diablo 3 must look pretty nice at native res on this thing. One question though ... Does the Diablo 3 UI scale, or are you stuck with minuscule text and icons?

[Mize]

Originally Posted by Scott_Arm

Mid 20fps at what res and what setting? I wouldn't really care about upscaling from a lower res if it could handle the game at normal to highest settings. Diablo 3 must look pretty nice at native res on this thing. One question though ... Does the Diablo 3 UI scale, or are you stuck with minuscule text and icons?

No clue, but I play at 6100x1920 (on 3 monitors) and the text and icons don't look huge.

[UniversalTruth]

Originally Posted by Grall

220 DPI

It should be around 320-350 dpi to match human vision.

Originally Posted by Mize

6100x1920 (on 3 monitors)

Very interesting configuration. How do you achieve such a resolution? By rotating them vertically?

[Mize]

Originally Posted by UniversalTruth

It should be around 320-350 dpi to match human vision.



Very interesting configuration. How do you achieve such a resolution? By rotating them vertically?

Oops, my bad.
I normall run 3x portrait which is about 3800x1920 with bezel correction.
Diablo III doesn't support 3x portrait on my SLI config so I run 3x landscape which is about 6100x1200.

[Davros]

We did, however, make one exception: anti-aliasing. When you're running at 2880 x 1800, there's no real need.

Ive wondered at what dpi we could do away with FSAA

[Man from Atlantis]

Originally Posted by Davros

Ive wondered at what dpi we could do away with FSAA

i dont have hard numbers but, it's already 2x2 OGSSAA compared to ordinary screens, i suppose 4x4 OGSSAA should do the trick ~450dpi

[Grall]

Originally Posted by UniversalTruth

It should be around 320-350 dpi to match human vision.

220 is the panel DPI... Then you watch it from a distance, raising the apparant DPI.

[UniversalTruth]

Originally Posted by Grall

220 is the panel DPI... Then you watch it from a distance, raising the apparant DPI.

Regardless of distance, human vision is capable of more than 576 megapixels (this is at 120 degrees viewing angle).
The resolution mentioned by you is only 5 megapixels.
See the hugee difference?

[pcchen]

Originally Posted by UniversalTruth

Regardless of distance, human vision is capable of more than 576 megapixels (this is at 120 degrees viewing angle).
The resolution mentioned by you is only 5 megapixels.
See the hugee difference?

Unless you look at your notebook at a distance like 3 inches, I don't see how 120 degrees viewing angle is relevant.
Also, human eye only has the best resolution at the center. Random eyeball movement increases the area, but that's by time accumulation (and the frequency is really not that high).

[Grall]

Originally Posted by UniversalTruth

See the hugee difference?

I don't see how that is relevant in any way, shape or form. Have you seen very many laptops with 120 degree screen coverage before? Or any stationary computer screens for that matter... Shit, even in a movie theater you're not going to have 120 degree field of view in many of the seats. Nor would you neccessarily want to, because peripheral vision in a human eye at least is not very accurate. You can experiment with this yourself if you like, if you don't believe me.

I myself never position myself in any of the frontmost rows of seats in a cinema because I find it very distracting having to re-focus my eyes around the screen to follow what is going on, because you just can't take in all of the visual information of a movie through that peripheral vision.

[Xmas]

Originally Posted by Davros

Ive wondered at what dpi we could do away with FSAA

In theory, you need infinite resolution. In practice, the filtering that is part of antialiasing is an important step for reducing certain kinds of artifacts, so you really don't want to do away with AA at all.

[UniversalTruth]

Originally Posted by pcchen

Unless you look at your notebook at a distance like 3 inches, I don't see how 120 degrees viewing angle is relevant.

The number of 120 was put there for illustration purposes only. In reality the viewing angle is even more than 120 degrees.
I look at my laptop at a distance like one full arm length. At this distance my field of view is occupied in 30-40% by its display.
So, imagine what the difference between 30-40% of 576 megapixels and 5 megapixels is.

That is arsehole's**tty low resolution no matter what your perception is forced to be.

[Arwin]

Originally Posted by Davros

Ive wondered at what dpi we could do away with FSAA

Personally I see that at a reasonable distance with not too big a TV, Full HD is already only marginally better with AA, only some types of graphics still cause interference issues. On the iPad 3 at an arms length, AA already becomes pretty meaningless.

[pcchen]

Originally Posted by UniversalTruth

The number of 120 was put there for illustration purposes only. In reality the viewing angle is even more than 120 degrees.
I look at my laptop at a distance like one full arm length. At this distance my field of view is occupied in 30-40% by its display.
So, imagine what the difference between 30-40% of 576 megapixels and 5 megapixels is.

That is arsehole's**tty low resolution no matter what your perception is forced to be.

It's actually very simple. All you need is a simple DPI number.

The widely accepted human eye acuity for a perfect 20-20 vision is ~0.3 arc minute (the actual number is like 0.59 arc minute per line pair, that's two pixels, so it's ~0.3 arc minute per pixel). Now, at 50cm (should be close to your "one full arm length"), that means the pixel size should be ~0.0436 mm. That's ~582 DPI.

This makes sense because most people can easily distinguish between 300 DPI and 600 DPI black and white print. Color prints generally need less DPI because they tend to have less sharp edges.

So yes, in theory, retina Macbook Pro's 220 DPI is not really enough for "real retina." But for color display it's probably good enough.

[Scott_Arm]

My macbook pro appears to be on its last legs and those bastards release a bunch of incredibly expensive macbook pros. It's all a conspiracy against me. I don't even want to buy another laptop. Why couldn't those guys have updated the mac mini or something? What a bunch of dicks.