--Yes a MBP can run games well. You can easily spec out a PC laptop to the same exact equipment, and in such cases the MBP should perform as well or better.
Multiple sites have reported that the 6770M in the 2.4 GHz MBP (late 2011) is underclocked, including Anandtech, ZDNet, Cnet, Macworld, and MacLife. I just picked up one of these two days ago, and installed Windows under Boot Camp specifically because I plan to play SWTOR when I travel, and the 13" MBP I own simply can't handle it at all (although it could run WoW without too much trouble at medium-low settings).
Based on my experience so far, this MBP is faster in Windows than my AMD Phenom II X6 desktop, which is no slouch. SWTOR has run fine on it, and I still need to test WoW on the machine.
I have a 2011 MBP with the 1gb video card. I played rift full settings no lag. it's a 15" I think the specs are in my sig or profile. You can run full settings with the new i7 with the better video cards. I have Diablo 3 beta right now and it runs well and theg raphics are much more demanding than Rift.
It can be tweaked, I'm just saying that out of the box a mbp will have less gaming performance than a similar computer, therfore a mbp will not perform as well as a similar speced pc.
I wouldn't say that. It might just be OSX ports. The games a buggy and suck.
I played Civ V on OSX with the newest patches almost 1 year after release. Now I had more complete and utter system crashes a day than I could possibly bear, especially once you were past 300 turns. I gave up on it eventually.
The drivers aren't that stable.
On Windows bootcamp on the same system not a single crash. Never one that took out the entire system and require a restart in any game I ever played there at the worst some came just quit if some error.
BUT under Windows I run a modified driver with 20% GPU overclock on the 330M. Thus if there was any heat problems they should be in Windows.
OSX graphics drivers are good enough for 2D but for 3D they just aren't a match not in speed and not in stability.