HD3000 gaming performance is awful. This is not really debatable.
For those of you linking the Anand benchmarks to support the claim that the HD3000 is "on par" with the old 320M, please note that it is important to differentiate between CPU-heavy and GPU-heavy tasks when making this determination. Case in point:
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On low settings, the quad-core + HD3000 outpaces the old MBP13. This is because the shader utilization on low settings is so minimal that the GPU is not the performance bottleneck. Contrast this with medium settings, where shader usage increases considerably (at least in SCII; other games will be different):
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Is the 3-year old C2D is beating up on the new Sandy Bridge quad core? No. This situation is GPU-bottlenecked, and demonstrates the utter inadequacy of Intel's integrated graphics in running even mainstream games at decent image quality settings and playable framerates.
Remember that these are average framerates; ideally you want your *minimums* to be in the 30fps area to maintain smooth gameplay, which is why averages of 60+ fps are desirable.
Look I appreciate the frustration but what are Apple supposed to do in this situation? Carry out a full redesign of their 13" notebook midway through it's product cycle to accomodate 0.1% of it's target base? Bottom line is that for most users the HD 3000 is fine and they'll benefit from substantially faster processor. It'll run all your software, play HD, run your graphic design software, even play some games on base settings. Looking at the benchmarks, the HD 3000 is behind the 320 and probably just the 9400 as well but it's more than enough for a small, lightweight 13" that's bordering on an ultraportable.
The Core 2 is way behind Sandy Bridge, add to that it's right at the end of it's lifespan. The Core 2 architecture is now 5 years old. As much as we'd all love the 320 in the i5 it isn't an option so I don't blame Apple for finally biting the bullet and switching. I assume they now consider the performance of the HD 3000 to be close enough to the 320 for most of their buyers and a big bonus of Sandy Bridge. Not ideal but hardly a disaster. Last year Apple received a huge amount of criticism for doing the opposite.
I've currently got both the 2010 and 2011 models sat in front of me and the 2011 feels quite a bit quicker.
For gamers it's a big let down, you probably are limited to playing games in base settings. For me, well I rarely play games. I'm running photoshop and some virtualisation tools and the 2011 model wins hands down.
Perhaps the truth is that the history of the Macbook and Macbook Pro 13" have always had fairly weak integrated graphics. They clearly aren't aimed at gamers. Hopefully next year we'll get a complete redesign with an even more powerful Intel HD or even better a dedicated card.
