I'm slowly slipping back into gaming but I'm limited to my Macbook Air 13" i5 until I move into my new place in a few weeks. Was wondering if anyone uses an Intel HD 3000 on board graphics chip for gaming? So far I've been quite impressed and I'm getting better performance than I was from the Nvidia 9600mGT which is really surprising. Problem is there isn't much out there on the internet which tells you what's likely to work and what's not. I'm worried that I'm going to be throwing cash at games only for them not to work. Plenty of benchmarks about but the numbers don't reflect true gaming experience. Yesterday I took a gamble and bought Left 4 Dead 2 from Steam and that runs really well at 1440x900, very high settings, Vsync= Yes, AA = No, Trilinear filtering. I'm in the process of downloading (legally) Batman Arkham Ayslum because I know the 9600 could handle it really well but I'm worried that being an onboard chip, results are likely to differ on a game by game basis. Anyone got any info on what works and what doesn't? I'm not looking for the best graphical experience, just something that looks half decent and is fun to play. How about Diablo 3? Cheers.
The reason I bought a 2500k and not an i5-2500 is because of HD 3000 vs 2000. I couldn't afford to buy a dedicated GPU at the time so I was heavily reliant on using the onboard for weeks. As you have discovered with L4D2, it can run source games at or around 720p with decent quality settings and frame rates, but it does struggle to go much higher. I didn't really try it on many other games to be honest - by the time I had completed Half-Life and got bored of CS:S and TF2 I had already got my first GTX 560 Ti so I can't help you out much sorry, but for what it is worth - if you stick to any DirectX 9 game or mode you can probably pull off something half decent, albeit at a console resolution.
Yeah that's what I'm finding. Batman Arkham Asylum runs pretty well on medium - high, mainly slow down in outdoor areas but it's bareable.
