Will the Next MacBooks Be Better Gaming Systems?

has announced plans to hold a special notebook event on Oct. 14, I'm desperately hoping for a new crop of MacBooks that have better video capabilities than the current run does. MacBooks have been enormously popular since their introduction, but their reliance on Intel-integrated graphics has made them almost wholly unsuitable for most of the graphically-intensive games on the market. They'll do just fine with "casual" games and with older games, but newer games either don't work at all or run so poorly that it's hardly worthwhile to even try them. Game publishers have responded by noting that "Intel GMA graphics are not supported" in many newer games; in some cases, they're able to eke out enough frames per second on newer MacBooks equipped with the GMA X3100 chipset to make it worthwhile, but that creates a fair degree of... [read full story]