AMD reveals Radeon Pro 400 series GPU specs, as used in new MacBook Pro

Spoiler: Don’t expect to do much gaming on your shiny new MacBook Pro.

Mark Walton – Oct 28, 2016 8:38 am | 138

Following the announcement of the new Apple MacBook Pro, AMD has launched the Radeon Pro 400 series of power-efficient graphics cards for laptops.

The range spans the Radeon Pro 450, the Radeon Pro 455, and the Radeon Pro 460, all of which are available in various models of the new 15-inch MacBook Pro. All are based on AMD’s latest 14nm FinFET Polaris architecture, as used in desktop gaming cards like the RX 480, and all have a thermal envelope of less than 35W.

AMD claims that the Radeon Pro 400 series features “the thinnest graphics processor possible,” thanks to the use of a die thinning process that reduces each wafer of silicon used in the GPU from 780 microns (0.78 millimetres) to 380 microns.

Unfortunately, while AMD claims the Radeon Pro 400 series is great for content creators like “artists, designers, photographers, filmmakers, and engineers,” those hoping to do a bit of gaming on their shiny new MacBook Pro will probably struggle.

	Radeon Pro 450	Radeon Pro 455	Radeon Pro 460
Stream Processors	640	768	1024
Memory Bandwidth	80GB/s	80GB/s	80GB/s
Peak Performance	1 teraflop	1.3 teraflops	1.85 teraflops

AMD has released a smattering of specs for the Radeon Pro 400 series on its Creators with Radeon Pro website, which show the Radeon Pro 450 used in the MacBook Pro to have a peak FP32 performance of around one teraflop. That’s under half the 2.2 teraflops of the desktop-based RX 460 and miles behind the performance of Nvidia’s Pascal-based laptop GPUs.

That said, the RX 460 and Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs are significantly more power hungry than the Radeon Pro 450. Apple has typically favoured power-efficiency over raw performance, and with Nvidia currently only offering its latest 16nm Pascal architecture in beefier chips, the Radeon Pro 400 series was likely the best fit.

With 640 stream processors (10 compute units) and 80GB/s of peak memory throughput, the Radeon Pro 450 is likely to perform similarly to the likes of the Radeon HD 7770 and R7 250X, both of which feature similar specifications. Reviews of the R7 250X show that while 1080p gaming at low and medium settings is mostly acceptable, high settings at reasonable frame rates are out of reach.

If you really want to do some gaming on your new MacBook Pro, there is one option available to you. The high-end 15-inch MacBook Pro (starting at £2,350) can be configured to use the Radeon Pro 460 for an additional £180. The Pro 460 will get you up to 1080p @ 60FPS in some games, with higher quality settings.

AMD has released a new Windows driver (16.Q4) to support its Professional graphics cards, which it says is “certified in over 100 workstation applications covering the leading software professionals use, including Autodesk AutoCAD, Dassault CATIA, Siemens NX, Adobe Premiere, Avid Media Composer, Autodesk Maya, and many more.”

Our MacBook Pro with Touch Bar review is now available.