That’s one reason dedicated graphics are only included in the largest, most powerful MacBook Pro. And in a fanless laptop like the 12-inch MacBook, you don’t have the cooling power to counteract that heat production. If you drop a hot, power-hungry GPU next to your CPU, you’ll shorten the CPU’s lifespan and lower its efficiency. Heat is the mortal enemy of highly-efficient silicon. Such graphics switching is possible with the current and past generations of MacBook Pros, but it’s buggy and not user accessible by default. Battery life with dedicated graphics is far more limited, unless you can design a way to only switch on dedicated graphics as needed. Graphics processing produces significant heat and requires substantial power. So there’s no incentive to produce a highly-expensive, high-quality version of integrated graphics.īut even if market conditions demanded rocket-powered integrated graphics, there’s some big physical limitations that would make that implementation difficult. They want a graphics card that can display the operating system’s interface, handle basic animations and play videos, not something that can handle heavy-duty 3D graphics processing. When folks use integrated graphics, they’re looking for a system that can get the basics done with minimal cost and complexity. Adding high-powered graphics to a CPU would drive the cost up far beyond simply pairing that CPU with a dedicated graphics card. But why can’t integrated graphics be as powerful as dedicated graphics?īuilding an efficient graphics processing machine is expensive, and that cost has to be passed on to the consumer. This means that, for the sake of efficiency and battery life, they use a less powerful chip that’s built into the CPU. The MacBook, MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro with and without the Touch Bar all ship with integrated graphics. This combination of CPU and GPU is called integrated graphics. Today, many CPUs, including most of the Intel chips that power the latest generation of MacBooks, have graphics processing built in. The same integration trend that lead to laptops has also taken hold in CPUs. While we might debate the trade offs between shrinking size and performance, one way Apple achieves this is through the clever use of integrated components, graphics among them. By saving space and power with efficient, soldered-on components, they can shrink year after year. This same miniaturization trend is what’s led to the modern generation MacBooks. Many of the functions that began on daughter cards, like networking and audio, are now built in to the motherboard by default.

But as miniaturization advanced and part design became more efficient, manufacturers began to combine systems together. Motherboards, which were once used simply to connect components to one another, now include dozens of discrete functions.

Apple macbook pro video card