“To evaluate the New Macbook’s gaming performance, we need a reference point, and lucky me, I have the perfect reference point right here on my desk: a 13-inch MacBook Air,” Ric Molina reports for Mac Gamer HQ. “You know what this MacBook Air is capable of, you’ve seen it handle graphically intensive games such as DiRT 3 or Beyond Earth. Yet, everyone assumes that it will melt away trying to play a demanding game. But time and time again, it proves them wrong.”
“We took the new 12-inch Retina MacBook and my 13-inch MacBook Air and ran the in-game benchmarks of Tomb Raider, Batman: Arkham City and Grid 2,” Molina reports. “All three great looking and demanding games, running on high settings for the first two and medium for the last.”
“All in all, gaming performance is similar on both machines, which makes sense as my MacBook Air’s Intel HD 5000 integrated graphics and the New Macbook’s Intel HD 5300 are very similar,” Molina reports. “So, if results show that both machines perform similarly, can we conclude that the New MacBook can play modern games? Yes, we can.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The 12-inch MacBook isn;t really designed as a gaming machine, but it’s nice to know that it can pull it off when desired (like on a long plane flight, for example).
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