MacBook Pro mid-2012, Retina display - terrible benchmark performance for graphics!

Hi, I have a mid-2012 MacBook Pro with the following key specs: 2.6 GHz Intel i7 quad-core processor; 8GB 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM; NVIDIA GeForce GT650M 1GB graphics card + Intel HD Graphics 4000; 512 GB SSD.

Unfortunately when running bench() I notice that the graphics performance is absolutely terrible...e.g. ~1.5 sec per 2D test and ~1.5 sec per 3D test in MATLAB R2013a. [All other components of the test are fast as expected] For comparison, the same 2D and 3D tests take about half the time on my 5-year old Mac Pro desktop with a 256 MB graphics card, and even less than that on my 3 year old laptop (running Windows) with a 512 MB NVIDIA graphics card. Any idea what might be going wrong? Anyone experiencing similar performance issues?

• Note: I have automatic graphics switching disabled i.e. I am forcing the system to use the NVIDIA card...although this seems to make no difference to performance i.t.o. the benchmarks!

Answer 1

[Vinesh Rajpaul]

Experiencing the same problem with much the same MacBook configuration. Re-installed CUDA driver to no avail. Would appreciate any insight!

Answer 2

[Mark Jones]

From what I have seen with my own MBP Retina, the NVIDIA chipset is only used for the external Thunderbolt display ports (which you can adapt to any other type of monitor with adapters).