Are the 15' High End MBPs' Shortcomings In Gaming Bearable?

[thesillypiggy]

I'm thinking about buying the new 15' 2.8 MBP and it'll basically be my desktop replacement. By all means I count as an everyday user; I'd be using it to surf the internet, email, watch videos, MS Word and occasionally Adobe products like Flash or Photoshop but I'm thinking about trying gaming. After a little digging, it is said generally that MBPs do decent but not the great you'd like at 25-30fps, if you're lucky, and I'm aiming for games like:

Sims 3 (I'm pretty sure this one would do just fine)
Crysis (Bootcamp/XP, not a big fan of Vista but it's said you need a monster to cut it and MBP does bare minimum on quality)
BioShock (Heard the shading needs to go and res goes down to med to work decent)
Halo CE
CoD4 (Similar situation to BS)
Deus Ex (As above)
Spore (Sucks any which way apparently)
STALKER (Like BS and CoD4)

Is the (lack of) performance of the MBP really that annoying or is it something that can be easily ignored? Should I get it or go for another system? Dell's XPS? HP?

 

[matanlevis]

Hey, I'm in the exact same situation as you but would like to get it for gaming + music production. Don't know if I should miss the chance to try out another OS and use other music editing programs which I heared are better than the ones for PC while playing new games on medium/low settings with an "alright" resolution or just go for normal pc laptop 17" 9800 GTS 1GB mem.

This is the hardest decision making I ever had to do

 

[littleasian]

all of the games should play well assumed you're using bootcamp. the graphics card in the mbp (9600) is pretty decent, you should get decent framerates and be able to play things on medium. if anything dropping it down a resolution (12800x600) will make things play for sure