Just an observation, the 2nd picture contains a fairly vulgar sentence on that chat box. Looks like a naughty GMOTD from Holykmoly from Elune server =O
I'm a little lost as to your confusion. Is your current MBA meeting all your needs or are you experiencing the "greener side of the hill" effect with the 2011 model? You mentioned yourself that you don't use CPU intensive programs, and therefore what benefit would you get from the 2011 MBA?
In any case you can read posts, look up benchmarks, and lust over stats, but what it comes down to is real world uses. For me the pictures below were really telling of the HD 3000, and its something I don't think a few drivers will fix.
The first being a 2010 MBA and the second being a 2011 MBA.
I would run WoW on low graphics. I mean, really, anything more just kills your frames on a machine like this where squeezing frames out would be ideal, as while it is playable, you can make it run a lot more consistently with lower settings. The game doesn't look bad at all with low settings, no AA, etc. It really doesn't look different at all.
Just adjust your view distance. Probably the only really important setting.
I'm not sure why it's so hard for you to figure out... The OP is tailing about gaming and the reply is correct, they are both underpowered for gaming. He probably didn't specify that because most people would have been able to figure it out pretty easily
may i just point out that stupid people shouldn't be allowed to post charts from notebookcheck. what they don't understand is that the intel hd3000 benchmarks on notebookcheck are from the i7 2630, 2920, and other processors much more powerful than those available in the 2011 airs. Therefore, its not even an accurate representation of the gaming performance difference in the 2010 and 2011 airs. and before anyone gets butthurt...read a little deeper into the notebookcheck benchmark scores. now if more people were like our kind wow playing friend above me, and could actually provide real 2010vs2011 results, we would stop having threads like this.
PS...this isn't just my 2 cents thrown in. It's fact.