I would argue that Divinity looks significantly better than TL2 or BL2 by a large margin.
Not from what I've seen so far. I'm guessing it has more to do with them being a kickstarter project, they simply aren't up to the programming quality level of commercial companies and the Mac is usually an after-thought to boot with many companies (i.e. who knows what shortcuts they may have taken to convert it). Torchlight 2 runs far smoother on my Mac than my Windows machine (which is a few years older, but had a top notch card in its day whereas the HD4000 is Intel dreck).
Also I would never attempt to compare the graphics of a 3D shooter to a glorified tile-scroller, but while Borderlands II may look "cartoonish" it is incredibly detailed down to reading small print on posters on the wall. Tile scrolling games aren't in the same leagues as real 3D, IMO.
I also believe it is far more "detail-heavy" in any given section of the screen. This no doubt adds to the problem.
You might be talking about later in the game, but the start of the game doesn't look like much to me. I just went through an area in Torchlight 2 that had not only a bridge over water, but complete smoke/fog effects throughout the area (that looked awesome) and snow and moved smooth as glass. Some of the enemies are 1/3 the size of the monitor screen. It never slows down one bit.
In Divinity, I had zero (and then like two a minute later) enemies on the screen in Divinity and the whole thing ran at the same oddly low frame rate regardless of what was on the screen PLUS it drags down my browser/desktop "frame rate" to boot (no game has EVER done that nor SHOULD it EVER do that unless it's using 100% of the CPU) all while using a whopping 15-30% of my CPU. It's doing something terribly wrong somewhere to screw up the desktop, that's for 100% certainty. Meanwhile, I can talk to three other people live in Borderlands 2 while jumping off a platform a mile up to the ground firing 8 rockets at once in mid-air ("Slab, did you just jump off the side...!?!?") and it doesn't bat an eye in terms of frame rate.
I just noticed on Steam it says "Additional Notes: HD3000 & HD4000 benefit from 8Gb of memory" do you have that?
Yes, I do. My specs are listed in my signature if you bothered to look.
It's also using RAID0 and I get 350MB/sec read on conventional drives (and yet load times are terrible on Divinity; Borderlands II takes like 6 seconds to load an entirely new map and the entire game comes up in a few seconds; Torchlight 2 is similar).
Even so you are at minimum spec, even though they list the HD3000, the 4000 is still minimum too. I agree it should be playable, but maybe you are experiencing a particular performance issue.
The 4000 is still nearly 2x faster than a 3000 and I've got games that don't even support the 3000 that run better. If a 4000 isn't good enough to run smooth even with no enemies on the screen, then they shouldn't list it in their specs, IMO.
I just installed Diablo 3 plus expansion and while not quite as smooth as Torchlight 2, it runs pretty smooth at 1280x800 and is still more than playable at 1680x1050 (my monitor's native res), probably 2-3x the average frame rate of Divinity (and the scaling is better; divinity's text is almost unreadable at lower resolutions).
I also just tried disabling XtraFinder (in case it somehow caused some interference being non-standard and the reaction in the desktop. When I tried to load my game, the whole thing just locked up and I noticed in Activity Finder the Steam overlay had crashed again. I apparently HAVE to turn it off first before even trying to play since they have some kind of buggered setup (no other game ever did that ever in Steam). The character movements aren't as bad as the scrolling backgrounds, which just look "choppy" (especially compared to Torchlight) even when they're moving/scrolling fairly fast. Turning on Vsync didn't help one bit (did make a difference in Diablo III, which had some screen tearing without it).
