Gamers can be lumped in to several categories:
Non-Gamers: People that don't play any games, not even simple flash ones
Casual Gamers: Partakes in flash games, bejeweled, Nintendo Wii, etc.
Part-Time Gamers: Non hardcore gamers that just want to play the occasional game and not concerned with playing at the best settings
Console Gamers: Gamers that play on 360/PS3
Niche Gamers: People that only play specific games like WOW, CS, etc.
PC Gamers: People who spend ungodly amounts of money on expensive gaming hardware to play a small library of games at the absolute best settings
I'm probably a part-time console gamer (and own a PS3) so I had no issues with getting a 320m equipped Macbook. The 320m is an integrated graphics card that borrows system RAM to run and therefore does not live up to it's potential if it were to be equipped with dedicated RAM. In return you get better battery life and in theory it costs less. But can it game? Nvidia named this card 320m because overall performance (even with shared RAM) is nearly identical to a dedicated 320m. The dedicated iteration as less cuda cores, but the performance is the same because it isn't integrated. Therefore, one can compare it to the dedicated 320m and it is better than a 310m.
Despite this, you'll often see PC gamers make snide remarks such as "it's only good for office applications" or "the only game it can run is minesweeper". This is because the intel integrated cards have traditionally rubbed people the wrong way (and btw, those cards can play games too other than minesweeper, but they are pretty slow compared to this 320m)
I'll summarize my experience with 30 days of gaming with the 320m. These are the games I tried with it: Modern Warfare 2, Metro 2033, Fear 2, GTA IV, Dirt 2, Fallout 3, Devil May Cry 4, Lost Planet, Oblivion, Crysis demo, Gears of War, SFIV, and The Orange Box. The 13" Macbook can generally play games that look as good as and even better then PS3, 360. This will appease most everybody but the discriminating hardcore PC gamer. In comparison to my previous 15" Macbook Pro with a 128mb 8600m, it runs as good as and better. Higher vram iterations of the 8600m perform better though from what I've read. So an integrated card on a 13" laptop is similar in performance to a dedicated mid-level one from less than 2 years ago which I think is kind of impressive
I ran all games at native res and usually with no AA. AA killed performance in all but the source games. I cranked up AF all the way because there was almost not hit in performance. I also enabled vsync and used triple buffering via d3doverrider. Modern Warfare 2 with textures set to auto and all other options set to default ran at around 45fps average with 30fps lows and 60fps in many instances. Same with Fallout 3, I used high settings but lowered shadows and water for a similar framerate to CODMW2. All the games in the orange box ran great, near 60fps. Portions of HL2:E2 and Portal ran at 45 fps, and most likely cause it's online TF2 ran around that often. In OSX, there is about a 15% performance hit (vsync off in OSX).
Street Fighter IV ran at a solid 60fps on medium settings as did Devil May Cry IV. Lost Planet ran 25fps average in DX11 mode and generally higher in DX9 mode for some reason, but has a motion blur effect that makes the game look smoother than the framerate is (not sure if it can be turned off). Gears of War ran at default settings 60fps. Oblivion ran 30ish FPS outdoors and 60fps indoors. Fear 2 was around 40fps on medium settings and somewhere between 20-25 on high. This is similar to Dirt 2.
I ran the Crysis Demo which ran around 30fps on medium settings. It looked crappy though. This one is highly tweakable and I didn't mess around with it, but people like to use it as a benchmark.
Now for the bad news, Metro 2033 and GTA IV. GTA IV is a crappy port and was made to use 3 cores. Since the Macbook only has two (and no hyper threading) performance suffers. I used a guide to achieve the console settings and tweaked the ini file a little. I got 20-25fps which I guess is similar to the console version but it stuttered a lot when loading new stuff and I wasn't a fan of it. Metro 2033 at the lowest settings averaged 22-25fps which is kinda playable I guess, but not for me. It runs off the s.t.a.l.k.e.r. engine which is also CPU-hungry from what I've read.
Finally, I didn't even bother with FFXIV which sucks even on better hardware. It's probably optimized to use the PS3's SPUs and not ported efficiently to the PC.
So in conclusion, if you're not a discriminating PC gamer (The kind who pays $1000 every few months to upgrade their gaming rig and then downloads games off a usenet subscription and is in essence contributing to the problem of a small library of pc games!) You'll find that this entry level system plays games on a similar level to modern consoles (not surprising cause consoles are old tech) which is likely all that many people inquiring really care about.
Remember to game in boot camp, don't bother with vmware or parallels or wine unless you're just messing around. Steam runs pretty good in OSX but there is a performance penalty. And finally, remember that in two years people will group this card with the 330m saying the performance is about the same. The little extra might mean something now but in the ever changing world of PC-hardware it won't make a difference someday. BTW - I compared my framerates to notebookcheck and they're similar. Also they are similar to the m11x despite the better video and arguably better CPU (it's ULV)
Non-Gamers: People that don't play any games, not even simple flash ones
Casual Gamers: Partakes in flash games, bejeweled, Nintendo Wii, etc.
Part-Time Gamers: Non hardcore gamers that just want to play the occasional game and not concerned with playing at the best settings
Console Gamers: Gamers that play on 360/PS3
Niche Gamers: People that only play specific games like WOW, CS, etc.
PC Gamers: People who spend ungodly amounts of money on expensive gaming hardware to play a small library of games at the absolute best settings
I'm probably a part-time console gamer (and own a PS3) so I had no issues with getting a 320m equipped Macbook. The 320m is an integrated graphics card that borrows system RAM to run and therefore does not live up to it's potential if it were to be equipped with dedicated RAM. In return you get better battery life and in theory it costs less. But can it game? Nvidia named this card 320m because overall performance (even with shared RAM) is nearly identical to a dedicated 320m. The dedicated iteration as less cuda cores, but the performance is the same because it isn't integrated. Therefore, one can compare it to the dedicated 320m and it is better than a 310m.
Despite this, you'll often see PC gamers make snide remarks such as "it's only good for office applications" or "the only game it can run is minesweeper". This is because the intel integrated cards have traditionally rubbed people the wrong way (and btw, those cards can play games too other than minesweeper, but they are pretty slow compared to this 320m)
I'll summarize my experience with 30 days of gaming with the 320m. These are the games I tried with it: Modern Warfare 2, Metro 2033, Fear 2, GTA IV, Dirt 2, Fallout 3, Devil May Cry 4, Lost Planet, Oblivion, Crysis demo, Gears of War, SFIV, and The Orange Box. The 13" Macbook can generally play games that look as good as and even better then PS3, 360. This will appease most everybody but the discriminating hardcore PC gamer. In comparison to my previous 15" Macbook Pro with a 128mb 8600m, it runs as good as and better. Higher vram iterations of the 8600m perform better though from what I've read. So an integrated card on a 13" laptop is similar in performance to a dedicated mid-level one from less than 2 years ago which I think is kind of impressive
I ran all games at native res and usually with no AA. AA killed performance in all but the source games. I cranked up AF all the way because there was almost not hit in performance. I also enabled vsync and used triple buffering via d3doverrider. Modern Warfare 2 with textures set to auto and all other options set to default ran at around 45fps average with 30fps lows and 60fps in many instances. Same with Fallout 3, I used high settings but lowered shadows and water for a similar framerate to CODMW2. All the games in the orange box ran great, near 60fps. Portions of HL2:E2 and Portal ran at 45 fps, and most likely cause it's online TF2 ran around that often. In OSX, there is about a 15% performance hit (vsync off in OSX).
Street Fighter IV ran at a solid 60fps on medium settings as did Devil May Cry IV. Lost Planet ran 25fps average in DX11 mode and generally higher in DX9 mode for some reason, but has a motion blur effect that makes the game look smoother than the framerate is (not sure if it can be turned off). Gears of War ran at default settings 60fps. Oblivion ran 30ish FPS outdoors and 60fps indoors. Fear 2 was around 40fps on medium settings and somewhere between 20-25 on high. This is similar to Dirt 2.
I ran the Crysis Demo which ran around 30fps on medium settings. It looked crappy though. This one is highly tweakable and I didn't mess around with it, but people like to use it as a benchmark.
Now for the bad news, Metro 2033 and GTA IV. GTA IV is a crappy port and was made to use 3 cores. Since the Macbook only has two (and no hyper threading) performance suffers. I used a guide to achieve the console settings and tweaked the ini file a little. I got 20-25fps which I guess is similar to the console version but it stuttered a lot when loading new stuff and I wasn't a fan of it. Metro 2033 at the lowest settings averaged 22-25fps which is kinda playable I guess, but not for me. It runs off the s.t.a.l.k.e.r. engine which is also CPU-hungry from what I've read.
Finally, I didn't even bother with FFXIV which sucks even on better hardware. It's probably optimized to use the PS3's SPUs and not ported efficiently to the PC.
So in conclusion, if you're not a discriminating PC gamer (The kind who pays $1000 every few months to upgrade their gaming rig and then downloads games off a usenet subscription and is in essence contributing to the problem of a small library of pc games!) You'll find that this entry level system plays games on a similar level to modern consoles (not surprising cause consoles are old tech) which is likely all that many people inquiring really care about.
Remember to game in boot camp, don't bother with vmware or parallels or wine unless you're just messing around. Steam runs pretty good in OSX but there is a performance penalty. And finally, remember that in two years people will group this card with the 330m saying the performance is about the same. The little extra might mean something now but in the ever changing world of PC-hardware it won't make a difference someday. BTW - I compared my framerates to notebookcheck and they're similar. Also they are similar to the m11x despite the better video and arguably better CPU (it's ULV)
