While Apple executives used the Cupertino computing giant’s October 30th, 2018 hardware event to wax poetic about the new MacBook Air, Mac mini and iPad Pro devices, the company also quietly announced that it would update its 15-inch MacBook Pro laptops with new graphics options.
As of November 14th, 2018, users can purchase 512GB 15-inch MacBook Pro devices with AMD’s Radeon Pro Vega 16 and Radeon Pro Vega 20 graphics chips.
The Vega 16 chip costs an additional $300, while the Vega 20 chip costs an extra $420.
Unlike the 4GB Radeon Pro 560X chip that comes with the default 512GB 15-inch MacBook Pro configuration, the new Vega chips feature 4GB of second-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HMB2), rather than graphic double data rate type five synchronous (GDDR5) RAM.
According to The Verge, Apple said that the new graphics chips will provide users with a performance boost of up to 60 percent compared to the Radeon Pro 560X chip.
AMD’s Vega chips are also present in Apple’s 2017 iMac Pro, though those are desktop-class Radeon Pro Vega 56 chips with 8GB of HBM2 memory and Radeon Pro Vega 64 chips with 16GB of memory.
Sadly, fans of Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Pro will have to continue relying on the integrated Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 and Iris Plus Graphics 655 chips that come with the company’s updated 2018 laptops.
Via: The Verge
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