Imac - Radeon M380 or M395

[Greenie28]

I am looking at buying a 27" iMac.

I appreciate there are new iMacs coming out at some point, but when that will be, who knows. Plus, my 2011 iMac is slow and I end waiting for the beachball to stop spinning.

Anyway, I was about to purchase the 27" with the Radeon M395, 2TB fusion etc, but I then noticed the M380 model and I was wondering what the difference is between the two graphics cards. No matter what I go with, it has got to have the 2gb fusion drive.

I am a photographer and use my current iMac for Lightroom and Photoshop, email and internet. I do not use it for design, gaming, video etc.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Lunder89]

The difference between the two graphics cards is simply performance. The M395 has more performance. For Lightroom and Photoshop, there will be no difference at all between the two.

 

[Zarniwoop]

M380... do not go in there. If you need 2TB HD, M395 is the only reasonable choice.

 

[Malus120]

As has already been stated the primary difference is performance.

The M380 is a rather underpowered chip which in some cases struggles struggles to draw the interface at a full fluid 60FPS at 5K, causing stutter which many find unpleasant. If you're actually utilizing the GPU for anything (for example Lightroom GPU acceleration or something like Pixelmator which can use the GPU to accelerate certain effects) I would expect this to be even worse (not to mention the acceleration itself will be slower than with a faster card)

Honestly, even the models with the higher end GPUs can have issues with stutter with a lot of windows open, so do yourself a favor stick with the M395, you'll thank yourself (and everyone on this thread) later.

 

[Greenie28]

Thanks for the replies, think I will go with the M395.

 

[Lunder89]

As has already been stated the primary difference is performance.

The M380 is a rather underpowered chip which in some cases struggles struggles to draw the interface at a full fluid 60FPS at 5K, causing stutter which many find unpleasant. If you're actually utilizing the GPU for anything (for example Lightroom GPU acceleration or something like Pixelmator which can use the GPU to accelerate certain effects) I would expect this to be even worse (not to mention the acceleration itself will be slower than with a faster card)

Honestly, even the models with the higher end GPUs can have issues with stutter with a lot of windows open, so do yourself a favor stick with the M395, you'll thank yourself (and everyone on this thread) later.

I do own a 5K iMac, with the M390 (Yeah I know, not M395, but close enough), and I have UI lag here too. It has nothing to do with the graphics card, but some very poor programming and optimizing om Apples part. Pretty much every Retina device suffers from it.

For some reason changing the display mode to sRGB fixes it...
It did for both my Macs, however I don't like the color calibration with sRGB on my iMac. It is much better on the MacBook Pro. I suspect it is because the iMac can display more colors. (In my opinion the colors get a little over saturated in sRGB)