GMA950 comparable to ?

Hey, I'm going to be ordering a Macbook pretty soon for school, and just wondering what dedicated card the included GMA950 would be comparable to. Now, I know the 950 is craptastic as far as gaming goes, but I have a desktop where I'll be doing that. The only gaming I'll be doing on my laptop would be the occational Starcraft, WarCraft3, and possibly a bit of NWN1.

The other specs of the Macbook would be:

2.16C2D
1.5GB 667Mhz DDR2 RAM
120GB HDD @ 540RPM

So in this situation, would the graphics capabilities be comparable to, say, a FX5200? More? Less? Just looking for a general idea here. Thanks.

GMA950 maybe GeForce 4 series or less

Not GeForce FX or Radeon Xxxx series

The intel GMA 950 doesn't even have programmable logic anywhere, or hardware T&L.

To put this in perspective, hardware T&L was debutted with the nVidia geForce 256... the ORIGINAL nVidia geForce card.

On that basis, the intel GMA 950 isn't even a DirectX 7 hardware part, or for that matter, beyond OpenGL 1.0.

even the FX5200 would be better than a GMA950.

It would be able to handle Starcraft 1, Warcraft and NWN1, but I think that's about it... and even then, at very poor graphical settings.

Even the might of the Core 2 Duo and all the RAM you can stuff in it gaming-wise will all be bottlenecked HARD by that intel GMA video.

Yeah, I know itll bottleneck, but I don't plan on any extensive gaming here.

Although I've heard people saying that the GMA can handle WoW at low settings, so should it not be able to run WC3 at at least decent settings?

It took intel about a year after the GMA950's initial release to have a driver that could even run Quake 3. And even then, it can only run that game at absolute minimum settings and resolution.

Better keep those expectations low... especially since some games will flat out deny an install at detecting an intel video chip of any kind.

Actually, the GMA950 is faster than the FX5200. My office PC has a 1.8GHz P4 w/FX5200 AGP card, and my laptop has a Core 2 Duo T5300 with GMA950 graphics.

The GMA 950-based laptop outperformed the FX5200-based PC on all 4 3DMark versions I ran on them.

3DMark 2001: GMA950=5850 and FX5200=4100

3DMark 2003: GMA950=1500 and FX5200=1100

3DMark 2005: GMA950=585 and FX5200=290

3DMark 2006: GMA950=195 and FX5200=would not run

Pretty pathetic scores, yes, but the GMA950 based laptop with its software T&L and vertex shader easily outperformed the FX5200, with hardware T&L and vertex shaders. I'm not sure how much the CPU influences the score, but I doubt that the 1.8GHz P4 in the desktop was bottlenecking a measly FX5200.