AMD 6630M vs Intel Iris Integrated Graphics

[AVT]

I am looking into buying the new Mac Mini.

Currently, I have a mid-2011 Mac Mini with an ATI 6630M video card. I use dual monitors, a 27" 2560x1440 and 23" 1920x1080. No gaming, but OS X does a variety of graphics stuff as part of daily operating system use such as minimizing windows, all of which stutters right now.

The new Mac Mini has Intel Iris graphics. I am unable to find the detailed specs via google, they will probably appear shortly as the new model was only announced today.

Is the Intel Iris graphics actually faster than the ATI 6630M? Or does the integrated nature (and the fact that it's Intel) make it worse even considering that it's much newer?

Appreciate any input. Please, no Mac vs Windows - I use a variety of software that only works on UNIX/Linux based systems, which makes Windows completely unsuitable for my purposes.

 

[Deleted member 89018]

Ah, it depends on which version of Iris they are using. Apple hasn't put on their website if it's the 5100 or 5200, which can make a difference in performance, and I don't see detailed tech specs for the new mini on their support pages yet. My guess is the 5100, as the 5200 has a higher thermal rating and I expect they were trying to keep that low for the mini.

The Mac version of the 6630M was really, really bottlenecked for performance:

http://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2294/radeon-hd-6630m-mac-edition.html

256MB of memory with less than 20GB/s of bandwidth for the GPU is going to make for crappy performance, regardless of how capable the actual graphics processor is.

Intel's integrated graphics have come a long, long way in recent years. We have a number of 13" Retina Macbooks at work, which use Iris graphics, possibly the same one as in the mini, and they're perfectly capable of driving multiple displays without any performance issues - the built-in retina display and a pair of 1080p displays is a common configuration with some of our users.

Non-gaming, I have no doubt it would be a much improved experience for you. I expect even if you were gaming it would feel like an improvement. I would suggest avoiding the $500 model, though. It's not that I think the HD 5000 is insufficient for your purposes (I think it would be fine), it's just that there's a huge performance difference between the $500 and the $700 base configs, easily enough to justify the extra cost.

Now, that said, and feel free to ignore this: have you considered rolling your own linux/unix box, instead of going with a Mac? You could put together a mini ITX system, which admittedly won't be as small as a mini, but put in a capable graphics card and keep the price very close to the mini, if not improve on price/performance.

 

[AVT]

Ah, it depends on which version of Iris they are using. Apple hasn't put on their website if it's the 5100 or 5200, which can make a difference in performance, and I don't see detailed tech specs for the new mini on their support pages yet. My guess is the 5100, as the 5200 has a higher thermal rating and I expect they were trying to keep that low for the mini.

The Mac version of the 6630M was really, really bottlenecked for performance:

http://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/2294/radeon-hd-6630m-mac-edition.html

256MB of memory with less than 20GB/s of bandwidth for the GPU is going to make for crappy performance, regardless of how capable the actual graphics processor is.

Intel's integrated graphics have come a long, long way in recent years. We have a number of 13" Retina Macbooks at work, which use Iris graphics, possibly the same one as in the mini, and they're perfectly capable of driving multiple displays without any performance issues - the built-in retina display and a pair of 1080p displays is a common configuration with some of our users.

Non-gaming, I have no doubt it would be a much improved experience for you. I expect even if you were gaming it would feel like an improvement. I would suggest avoiding the $500 model, though. It's not that I think the HD 5000 is insufficient for your purposes (I think it would be fine), it's just that there's a huge performance difference between the $500 and the $700 base configs, easily enough to justify the extra cost.

Now, that said, and feel free to ignore this: have you considered rolling your own linux/unix box, instead of going with a Mac? You could put together a mini ITX system, which admittedly won't be as small as a mini, but put in a capable graphics card and keep the price very close to the mini, if not improve on price/performance.

Sorry, should have clarified in the OP. I would be buying the high-end $1000 model.

I've thought about going to Linux, but the current state of desktop Linux is impractical for me due to user interface issues and complexity of setup. To give an example, I use LaTeX for typesetting mathematical documents, together with the Latexian editor. This editor has a live preview that updates near-instantaneously as I typeset documents. There are only 2 other editors that do this, and I don't like either one of them for other UI-related issues. Beyond that, switching to Linux would take so much time and effort to set up correctly, that it is not worth the price difference between just keeping the Mac.

 

[Deleted member 89018]

Fair enough! Just figured I'd ask - I've been using desktop linux for years, but I don't have a specialized use-case like that.

Hope the rest of the post was helpful. With either of the models with Iris, I think you'd be looking at much improved UI experience.

 

[AVT]

Fair enough! Just figured I'd ask - I've been using desktop linux for years, but I don't have a specialized use-case like that.

Hope the rest of the post was helpful. With either of the models with Iris, I think you'd be looking at much improved UI experience.

Definitely helpful! Just waiting at this point to see what the actual specs are, and also SATA SSD vs PCI-E SSD, but it seems very likely that I'll be buying one.

That memory bottleneck might be what is causing the stuttering, because there's no way the calculations involved in resizing windows are that complicated - at least compared to other stuff the 6630M is capable of doing.

A number of people I work with use Linux day-to-day. It does the job, and is very customizable, but is also a lot more involved. Then again, we have one guy who is still running an ancient Sun Microsystems system with some 2001-era flavor of BSD on it, but he doesn't do anything other than send emails on it anymore. Great OS, but IMHO is at its best in situations where stability, customizability, and security are the primary concerns, and UI fragmentation is a non-issue, such as servers, computing clusters, etc. It pains me quite a bit whenever I encounter people running their critical infrastructure on closed-source Microsoft products..