Intel HD4000 vs. my old Nvidia 8600M GT

[lannisters4life]

I have an early 2008 Macbook Pro with the Nvidia 8600M GT (256MB), and am going to buy a cheap new 13" Macbook Air. Does anyone know of any benchmark websites or simply people who've owned both of these computers so I can compare the graphics performance of the two? The only game I care about is Portal 2, but it will be driving an Apple Thunderbolt Display pretty much every day.

If the performance of the HD4000 is significantly less than the 8600M, I'll wait a few months and get a retina Macbook Pro.

 

[TheMacBookPro]

NotebookCheck.net is a great resource to compare mobile graphics cards.

Here's the 8600M GT (Class 4, with Class 1 being best): http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-8600M-GT.3986.0.html

3DMark06 average score was 3347.4.

And here's the HD4000 (Class 3): http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-4000.69168.0.html

3DMark06 average score was 5322.5.

I'd say you'll be fine running Portal.

I just noticed, the HD4000 is ranked just slightly lower than the 6490M in the 2011 base 15" Pro. That's pretty impressive.

 

[lannisters4life]

Thanks, that's great news.

 

[throAU]

The HD3000 runs portal and half life 2 just fine on the old 2011 MBA.

So a new MBA will be fine for portal.


edit:
uh... misread... dunno on portal2, but Intel HD video no huge slouch these days. Sure its not as fast as a top of the line discrete GPU, but you can actually use them...

 

[leman]

HD4000 is about the same performance as Nvidia's dedicated 330M, so clearly faster than the 8600M and 9600M GT