What Does A Retina Display Mac Mean For Gaming? [Opinion]

Mac gaming, long the red-headed-stepchild of the computer gaming scene, just stepped up its, well, game. Today’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco saw several announcements from Apple regarding gaming, including the fact that the hot new MacBook Pro will have Retina graphics capabilities.

The new MacBooks have pixels so small, Apple says they can’t be individually discerned by the human eye. The display will have a resolution of 2880X1800 pixels, powered by a NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M GPU optimized for laptops.

According to NVIDIA itself, “the (Kepler-based) GeForce GT 650M offers unprecedented performance and extreme energy efficiency, giving it the muscle to process the 5,184,000 pixels in the next-gen MacBook Pro’s ultra high-resolution display.”

While the graphics chip here isn’t the highest end chip out there, it is a solid mid-level graphics chip that will run higher end games, like Activision Blizzard’s new hit, Diablo III, at higher than current graphical demands. It is also supposed to manage power to keep a laptop like the MacBook Pro running longer.

Does this signal a move by Apple into the higher end gaming scene? I’m not sure it’s ready to commit to that, as yet. Apple’s choice to include the GT 650M shows a continued balance between power management and performance.

However, I do believe that a Retina display like the one we saw announced today is only the tip of the iceberg, as far as gaming goes. My guess is that the move of Game Center from iOS to Mac, coupled with the higher end graphics card and super amazing Retina Display can only be a good thing for Mac gamers both now and clear into the future. But will it be enough to give the Mac the lead over the PC when it comes to gaming? Only time will tell.

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• Source The Verge

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