Well I have a very different experience when I tried games on the retina at
1980x1200,with all setting in the given games maxed out. It was subpar compared to my gaming pc. I guess we have very different expectations on what fluid gaming is. Skyrim by the way is not a very taxing graphical game. It's acceptable on the retina, yes acceptable, the drops in the fps are really annoying at times.
I quess we are coming from different and opposite sides, you might be used to gaming on laptops and I from purpose build pcs, whilst your gaming experience on the retina might be pretty darn good, for me it's a long long way from it. I've always had MBPs and whist games run okay on it, it was a crap experience compared to a desktop gpu. If you like your laptop gaming sweet , but my point is that people reading on these forums that are coming from a desktop are going to get a shock when they game on the retina after reading how awesome it is and how it plays titles on max..... The retina is a very good machine built for pros in mind, it's not built for gaming in mind. Remember the biggest killer of electronic components is heat! If your going to be gaming on the retina make sure you get AppleCare your going to need it. After killing 2 MBPs and an iMac after abusing them with gaming, I just bought a gaming pc.
Even though people still confuse similarly named mobile GPUs to their desktop big brothers, PC gamers with dedicated gaming rigs are well aware of the generational gap between mobile and desktop GPUs. They're usually the ones who write things like "gaming laptop is an oxymoron" in amazon reviews and such. They're also a niche with a stereotype associated with them not unlike how apple fans have a stereotype associated with them.
The kind of folks who will pay several hundred dollars on a gaming rig (some who upgrade with every new generation) and are able to point out the significant flaws in the ancient console technology. Ironically most PC games are console ports and many of them have little enhancements other than resolution. I'm generalizing here but this is a truthful generalization. And because the majority of gamers game on consoles (and the reason why PC gets sloppy seconds) the 650m would be fine.
The 650m is technologically mediocre in PC gaming land, that's a fact. But it's also a fact that there is hardly anything taking advantage of that extra power in terms of games, therefore it's going to be fine for most people. To be fair they showed off some pretty stunning new engines at E3 that might give laptops trouble. We won't know for a while.Some PC gamers use the extra power to run multiple and super-wide gaming environments which nobody expects to do with a macbook.
I know PC gamers have different standards of acceptability, but sometimes it borders on ridiculousness. Going the extra mile in terms of shelling out a lot of money just to turn on a superficially worthless (because it's hardly noticeable) feature like 8x transparency AA. There are people who actually do this even though Nvidia's new FXAA driver-level implementation does a better job at smoothing alpha textures. It's also basically free and not ugly (seriously I thought it was ugly because people kept saying it was until I tried it). It even looks better than uber sampling in The Witcher 2 without the performance cost that I'm sure people have actually paid extra money for despite it's relatively minimal impact to begin with.
I see what you're saying, I'm just saying that's the PC gamer perspective and they already avoid gaming laptops. It wouldn't apply to a sub 30fps and sub hd console gamer.
The 650m GT in the retina macbook is overclocked and nearly comparable to a 660m GTX as a result. The 660m GTX is the replacement for the 560m GTX found in expensive gaming laptops that don't cost much less than the macbook. More powerful laptop GPUs and SLI/crossfire setups are much more expensive and generate much more heat requiring much larger laptops and making much less sense then buying a desktop. I'm just saying the Macbook is in league with gaming laptops. Whether it will hold up or not remains to be seen (in terms of dead MacBooks from too much gaming).
You're right that Skyrim is acceptable. It's beautiful though at retina res. I play it at 1440x900 to be smoother (since that's exactly half of native) but sometimes I play it on retina. A PC gamer might call it unplayable, but they're a specific niche who again already think gaming on laptops is unplayable.
Witcher 2 is over 30fps at 1440x900 (cut scenes might be in the 20s because of the DOF, but they're cutscenes) with everything maxed accept SSAO off and of course no uber sampling. It looks and plays great. Hopefully I'm not frying my mac. And again, a PC gaming snob might call this unplayable
