October 13, 2008

The word on the street is that Apple's new high-end MacBook Pro is set to ship with an NVIDIA 9600M GT, arguably the most underwhelming GPU upgrade to Apple's "pro" part in years. Don't quote me on that, but the rumor sites have long speculated that the MacBook Pro, which currently uses NVIDIA's 8600M GT mobile GPU, would transition to the shave-and-a-haircut 9600M GT -- effectively an up-clocked 8600M GT built on a smaller nanometer process -- experiencing the sort of modest performance leap that flatters even single digit percentages.

Why so hard on the 9600M GT? Because there's simply nothing exciting about it. Same number of vertex/pixel shaders as the 8600M GT, same poky 128-bit memory bus, slightly faster clocks, slightly cooler due to its smaller manufacturing process -- a benefit obviously neutralized by its running at said slightly higher clocks.

Let's get one thing straight before I continue slapping the 9600M around: I'm talking about the MacBook Pro here, not the new MacBook. You want the scoop on the MacBook with its rumored Intel-GMA-killing integrated NVIDIA GPU? Have a look at Peter Cohen's "Will the next MacBooks be better gaming systems?"

Okay. Let's have a look at some actual numbers, here compiled by Notebookcheck, a kind of mobile GPU data cube you can slice and dice to find rough analogues between parts, one that offers a crude but durable means of getting a ballpark feel for performance metrics. All detail settings in F.E.A.R. and Doom 3 were cranked to maximum here, and the MacBook Pro's numbers were pulled out of Boot Camp.