MacBook Pro 13" (2010) for gaming
The 13" MacBook Pro (and also the 13" MacBook) contain a Geforce 320m integrated chipset graphic card which lacks dedicated vram and uses system ram. This alone turns people away and the immediately begin to think negatively of it. To add to the confusion there is actually a 320m GT dedicated graphics card available for notebooks and notebookcheck.com even says something like 'don't confuse it with the integrated MacBook version'. I'm guessing nvidia named it 320m because it's performance is pretty similar to the dedicated 320m. Because it is. There is nothing wrong with this integrated card at all! There is some other thread here where somebody compares the MacBook to a similar form-fact Asus notebook with a 310m and says "the 310 will be better cause it's integrated". Nope. Sorry, the real-world tests and benchmarks say otherwise
I used to own a 15" MacBook Pro with an 8600m GT 128 MB DDR3 card. In my real-world gaming tests, peformance is either similar and exceeding the 2-year-old 8600m GT. I think that's good for a chipset card
In snow leopard, I tested out the Orange Box. TF2, Portal, and HL E2&3 run at 45-60fps at native res with vsync disabled and no AA. In Windows they run at the same speed with 4xAA. Just because I support Steam and gaming on OS X, I'll take the slight penalty and run them natively. Half Life 2 runs at 60fps on both platforms (no AA on SL though) but it is a 6-year-old game!
Under Windows 7 64-bit in boot camp, Fallout 3 runs an average of 45fps at native res, no AA. 60fps in many places, but 30fps and sometimes in the 20s when there are a lot of characters on-screen. Note that this is the same as on my old 9800 GTS because the physics for NPCs are CPU-bound. Settings are a combo of medium-high
Lost Planet runs at native res at about 30fps average with default settings (medium-high)
Modern Warfare 2 runs 30-60fps at native res, no AA with high quality textures. You can enable 2xAA and reduce the res to 1024x640 which is still better than the console versions and get a FPS bump, but I prefer the native res look.
GTAIV, this one stinks on most PCs because it was poorly optimized. It has a physics-heavy engine that relies on multi-core. Since it was designed for the 3-core xbox 360, it's a little unhappy on a 2-core PC. After some INI tweaks I found online, I was able to get it to look about the same as the console versions and run at 30fps. (at a 1024x640 res)
Gears of War, this one runs natively at default and even high settings at 30fps
Devil May Cry 4, I lowered the details to medium to get the console version's 60fps. They look pretty much the same as the PS3 version
Bionic Commando Rearmed - One of my fav download-only games. Runs perfect at 60fps native res
Street Fighter IV - Lower the texture detail to medium and it runs at 60fps and looks awesome. Lowering texture detail doesn't make much of a difference
Crysis (demo) - Only used this for benchmarking purposes.. Had to lower the res and use low detail to get about 30fps but it still looked nice because it's probably still the most advanced engine around
Those are all the games that I have to test out. My 3dmark scores were nearly the same as on notebookcheck for the 320m. All around, for a 13" 4lb laptop with a 10-hour rated battery life, pretty impressive gaming performance. Eliteist gamers will want to stay away, but then again they should stay away from gaming on laptops altogether. Even the best laptop graphics card in SLI is equivilent to a mid-level >$180 desktop card
