MacBook Pro 16-inch gets huge graphics boost — but it'll cost you

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You can now configure the MacBook Pro with a new Radeon Pro 5600M GPU

(Image credit: Laptop Mag)

Apple updated the 16-inch MacBook Pro today with a new high-end graphics card: the AMD Radeon Pro 5600M GPU with 8GB of HBM2 memory. 

The Radeon Pro 5600M has 40 compute chips and is reportedly up to 75% faster than the Radeon Pro 5500M with 4GB of vRAM, and up to 3.5x faster than anything you could get in the previous 15-inch MacBook Pro.

Upgrading from the Radeon Pro 5500M with 8GB of vRAM, the previous top-end chip, to the Radeon Pro 5600M costs a hefty $600 (and $700 more than the base model).

Built on a 7-nanometer process, the Radeon Pro 5600M uses AMD's RDNA architecture to harness power for video editing, application development or game creation. AMD says the chip delivers 5.3 teraflops (TFLOPS) of floating-point performance. 

The chip should provide better graphics performance than what you can get on any other MacBook laptop, although it's unclear how it compares with Nvidia's RTX chips.

The new graphics card for the 16-inch MacBook Pro was announced just weeks before WWDC, Apple's annual developer conference. The company also revealed a new SSD kit for the Mac Pro designed for user-installation. It features 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and 8TB storage modules. 

Phillip Tracy
Phillip Tracy

Phillip Tracy is the assistant managing editor at Laptop Mag where he reviews laptops, phones and other gadgets while covering the latest industry news. After graduating with a journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin, Phillip became a tech reporter at the Daily Dot. There, he wrote reviews for a range of gadgets and covered everything from social media trends to cybersecurity. Prior to that, he wrote for RCR Wireless News covering 5G and IoT. When he's not tinkering with devices, you can find Phillip playing video games, reading, traveling or watching soccer.