Inside the new MBP: NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT
One of the major new features of the new MacBook Pro is the addition of the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT video card. This is a switch from the ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 GPU which shipped in the previous MBP
The 15-inch MacBook Pro ships with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor with dual-link DVI support and 128MB of GDDR3 SDRAM (2.2GHz config) and 256MB of SDRAM on the 2.4GHz configuration.
The 17-inch MacBook Pro also ships with the 8600M GT with 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM, but as has been previously noted, it doesn't have the LE-backlit display.
The upgraded NVIDIA card supports dual display and video mirroring and supports full native resolution on the built-in display and up to 2560 by 1600 pixels on an external display, both at millions of colors.
Previous 15-inch Core 2 Duo MacBook Pros shipped with an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 video card with either 128MB of GDDR3 SDRAM (2.16GHz) or 256MB (2.33GHz).
The 8600M GT is a formidable video card which appears to be on par with the ATI Mobility Radeon x1900 according to early benchmarks.