Any good for gaming

[andrewp]

Heya just bought the i5 500gb mbp, but I wonder whether it is any good for gaming since the 330m seems a little weak. Does anybody have any gaming experience (game performance) with it or can point me to a review somewhere?

 

[mikeo007]

Lots of threads in this very forum actually. General consensus is that it's fine for casual gaming, but only tolerable for more in-depth gaming and brutal for hardcore gaming.

 

[mrsir2009]

It will be fine for casual gaming. But don't try to use it for hardcore gaming, as it may not handle too well.

 

[0186279]

the i5 with 256mb gpu is ok for casual gaming, whereas the i7 with 512mb will be able to handle more graphic intensive stuff.

Either way your i5 will do well on most games if you play on meidum settings (maybe putting some stuff to low). Enjoy!

 

[johnalan]

the i5 with 256mb gpu is ok for casual gaming, whereas the i7 with 512mb will be able to handle more graphic intensive stuff.

Either way your i5 will do well on most games if you play on meidum settings (maybe putting some stuff to low). Enjoy!

The i5 will not be the bottleneck for any game, so having the i7 will make very little difference, also the 512mb 330m card has an advantage only with texture storage... there fore below a certain texture quality it makes no difference with the extra video memory.

Also if you take a look at the 3dmark site the 330m pulls in impressive scores, beating out cards from 2 years ago that were called hardcore gaming cards.


On another note I don't understand this thing people do where they label current lower end systems only for casual use/email/internet/word processing...

for example 5 years ago a high end P4 was for HARDCORE users and a Celeron was word processing, now the i7 is for hardcore users and the i5 will just do email...

it's such rubbish, unless your transcoding video or running geekbench tests there is no difference between the i5 and i7,

/rant

 

[dsprimal]

you'll be able to play games on medium settings.

 

[0186279]

On another note I don't understand this thing people do where they label current lower end systems only for casual use/email/internet/word processing...

I didn't say that at all, I am talking strictly gaming.

And if you take a look at some of the gaming threads around here, specifically the benchmarks thread, you will notice that people with the i7/512 setup are running the same games better than those with the i5/256 setup. It obviously makes a difference. Maybe not in all cases, but the speed increase is certainly there.