Graphics Card Help...

[troc]

I am planing on buying the new 13 inch macbook pro and boot camping in order to play games, especially Civ 5. This laptop has a new sandy bridge processor and 4GB of RAM, so those don't worry me. What does worry is the graphics card. It worries me because it says it is an Intel HD Graphics 3000 with 384MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory, while the minimum requierements for the game are 256MB graphics. So, is 384MB of SHARED memory enough to run the game? I'm not looking for amazing performance, I just want the game to run decently. Any help?

 

[Dedrytus]

Graphic cards from Intel are not good for games. I do not think CiV will start on it at all.

 

[aziantuntija]

If you plan to play games with your laptop just make sure it doesnt have a Intel GPU, because they suck. Our second comp is a laptop and it has Intel GMA 4500M and it advertises that it can have over 1GB of memory (shared RAM ofcourse, ddr3). I installed civ5 on it just to see how it runs on it, well as I suspected, it was unplayable. I mean it was allready unplayable at the beginning of the game and it only gets worse from there because the map starts to reveal and more units start to appear. Infact if you ask from me, even civ4 was unplayable with Intel GMA 4500M (but still my girlfriend played it somehow when we bought the comp about 1.5 years ago, but even she said that civ5 is unplayable with it). Im not the best advisor of wich laptop you should buy to play games with because for gaming I would recommend building your own desktop pc, but I CAN say that if you want to play games, stay away from intel GPU's. I also can say that our old laptop (that broke) had GeForce Go 7300 TurboCache and it ran civ4 pretty nicely, infact it ran it VERY nicely. If you must get laptop for gaming then at least stay away from Intel GPU's.

 

[adultswim88]

Unless you're dead set on purchasing a mac (honestly, I don't know much about them), I would look into the Asus, MSI, or Toshiba laptops on your favorite retail website. Those laptops will have the SB processor you are looking for and will also have a dedicated graphics card (nvidia or ati/amd).

I've been using the egg for years and their site is very easy to navigate. I'd recommend starting there.

I would post links and be more specific on names, but this is my first post on this forum and I'm not 100% sure what is and isn't allowed yet.