13'' 2015 Macbook Pro (Please help, quite urgent)

[Ail]

Hello,

Before hand I want to remark that I have done hours of research, browsed through endless benchmark pages yet still don't feel confident enough to make a proper decision and I have to make the decision very very quickly as I have a few shows coming. Thanks for understanding and sorry if my question is a bit dull and noobish. It's about buying a new laptop obviously.

To sum up quickly; I will be using two Macbook Pros for the show, one for for the audio, one for the visuals obviously. I already have one but planning to buy this as the second;
https://www.amazon.com/Apple-MF839LL-13 ... B00UGBMRQ8
2.7 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5 Processor (Turbo Boost up to 3.1 GHz, 3 MB shared L3 cache)
8 GB 1866 MHz DDR3L RAM; 128 GB PCIe-based Flash Storage
13.3-inch IPS Retina Display, 2560-by-1600 resolution
Intel Iris Graphics, Force Touch Trackpad

The one I currently own is a much lower one.
Here are it's specs;
2,53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
8 GB RAM 1067 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT 512 MB
NVIDIA GeForce 9600M 256 MB
(has two video cards / might upgrade this to SSD if you recommend)

Probably the 2015 Macbook Pro will be handling the audio and my old Macbook Pro the visuals (can switch with your recommendation). It's likely that I will load at least 10-15 1920x1080 visuals to Resolume yet will play only 3-4 full lenght and 1-2 one shot visuals simultaneously with 1 or 2 effects on them. My main concern is that would that work safely on either of the laptops? On the benchmark pages I couldn't figure out if those numbers were for visuals playing simultaneously or just total numbers of visuals that can be added to comp without losing FPS.

Also a bonus question is that, the screen they have in a venue is about the size of a cinema screen. I wonder if 1920x1080 visuals would turn to a pixel show in a few meters or should I use 4k definitely?

Thank you very much again - if you can just say, go ahead, buy the 13'' 2015 Macbook Pro and you can safely play 3-4 Full HD videos at the same time on a single screen I will be satisfied enough. Or say stop obviously

Thank you endlessly.

[Warspite]

Core2 Duo Macbook is too slow.
13 inch is not a great choice either.
You must go with Retina Macbook Pro 15 with discrete graphics (Geforce 650 or 750 or Radeon).
But even cheapest Retina 15 from 2014 is faster than Retina 13, because they use Crystalwell i7 with embededd graphics buffer on chip die. On my tests 15 inch MBP 2014 kept 60fps, 13 inch 2014 dropped to 35 with same content playing. But better go with discrete.
If you plan to play 4 full HD layers - all files must be encoded in DXV.

[Zoltán]

the benchmark is about playing the number of layers at once.
Download links are in the first post of the benchmark thread, connect an external monitor, switch on fps display in the output menu, load the composition, reconnect media, and launch layers one by one.

[Ail]

Thanks for the replies.

I tried to find a 2013-2014 15'' Macbook Pro (even secondhand) but no luck on finding a clean one so buying a new 13'' 2015 seemed to be the only option...Maybe I should look a bit more for the sake of Geforce 650 or 750 or Radeon instead of Iris?

But also my only trouble is to play only 4-5 Full HD layers simultaneously even though the comp would have another 15-20 loaded. Do you think it would fail even at that?

By the way, I tried that on my older Macbook Pro (specs are also above) and it worked fine around 50-60 FPS - 4 1920x1080 videos, All DXV codecs obviously.