What games will Intel Ivy Bridge processors run well?

StickyWaffles

StickyWaffles

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I had a decent laptop but it was stolen a few months ago, so I'm looking for a new laptop, to not lose this time. The main focus of the 3rd generation of the Intel Core processors seems to be reducing power consumption and to make the integrated graphics much more powerful in the form of Intel HD Graphics 4000. From the charts I've read , all Core i7 Ivy Bridge will have the 4000 graphics, and a couple of the Core i5, which is what I'm hoping to get in my next laptop, along with 6-8 GB of RAM, which should be enough power for awhile. The 4000 integrated graphics will have Direct X11, but I don't have too much of an understanding of computers or graphics cards to know if this will be enough.

The main games I'm looking forward to playing are Civilization V, StarCraft II, and I might try World of Warcraft now that it's free for the first 20 levels. The Witness is the only game I'm interested in that isn't out yet, and that won't be coming to Xbox, so I definitely want to make sure whatever laptop I buy, it can handle that game. Does anyone have any idea if Ivy Bridge will be able to run these games capably without a dedicated graphics card?

Thanks for any help, hope to talk about Ivy Bridge and other stuff that came out of CES with you guys.
 
I would definitely go for a machine with a dedicated gpu. The games you are looking to play which are mostly Blizzard games will run on integrated graphics on lowest settings, especially WoW, but if you want anything better than that you need a video card, which doesnt neccesarily mean that its expensive. As we are moving onto new hardware, you can get a lappy with a 400 series nvidia for cheap.

Here is the base model for one of my laptops that I highly recommend
http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Game...S6MO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326265586&sr=8-1
 
I'm in love with the 14-inch Samsung Series 5 Ultra, but $949 seems like a lot with no graphics card, and I'm not sure how much the 1 GB Radeon HD 7550M upgrade is going to cost yet. If Ivy Bridge fulfills the hype that I'm building up for it, then I would definitely hope they would refresh the Series 5 with it, and then this is definitely the laptop I would get.

There's a Series 7 laptop that I like a lot, but the cheaper version that I can afford doesn't have a nice graphics card. It has a 512 MB AMD Radeon HD 6490M Graphics instead of 1 GB AMD Radeon 6750M, would this struggle to run Civ V and StarCraft II? The recommended cards are
Video: 512 MB ATI 4800 series or better, 512 MB nVidia 9800 series or better
for Civ V and
512 MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800 GTX
ATI Radeon® HD 3870
(or better)
for SCII, but I still haven't figured out the ranking system for graphics cards, so any advice is appreciated.

Thanks for the quick response. That is an amazing laptop, but definitely out of my price range, and too big to take with me around campus. I mostly play games on 360, but I love Civ and want to try the Blizzard games. I'm hoping to run the games I listed at medium settings with 1366x768 resolution, that one's overkill for me. haha
 
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The real question is the price range you are looking at?

I think you would be better off with a dedicated gpu and a lesser processor, than a shiny new processor without the dedicated gpu, but to each their own.
 
Probably about $800. The new integrated graphics definitely won't touch what a dedicated GPU can do, but if it is enough for these games to run smooth and look decent, I would be happy with it.

I like the look of the Samsung laptops, so I've been pretty set on getting the Series 7 laptop, but it's not available everywhere because of all the flooding in Asia, specifically in Thailand from what I've read. The cheap version I listed earlier is recertified, and they list the retail price as $1,299, when the actual retail price of that model is around $999, but Best Buy just had it for $829 the week before Christmas.

The really expensive model has always been out of stock at amazon and newegg, which are the only 2 places I've thought about buying so that I can avoid tax, and they tend to have decent discounts. I could do without the backlit keyboard (and the number pad, I'm used to keyboards without it), 2 GB less RAM that the cheaper version loses, and even 250 GB less hard drive space which is something that both versions have, but the graphics card and the express cache with an iSSD seem too important to settle for the cheaper version unless the price drops further on that recertified version.

Ideally, newegg or amazon starts selling the expensive model, and it goes on sale for $1,000 within the next month or two (probably asking too much) or they start selling the expensive model recertified for $800- $900 (also seems unlikely given how few there have been anyways).

I agree with both of you though, I'm probably better off getting the laptop now and getting a dedicated GPU, rather than holding off for something that will be inferior to a dedicated GPU anyways. Thanks for making me see the light on that at least. haha
 
I'm using an Asus g53sw from newegg. It was 1100 in June when I got it and I can run everything i throw at it in 1080 with usually a mix of high/medium settings with a good framerate (45 to 60).

this is my first Asus product and I've been extremely impressed with it. So if opinions can lean you one way, I would suggest looking at Asus. The laptop itself is pretty ugly, but that's a selling point for me cause nobody is going to think it can do anything cause it looks like it's a laptop from 1994.
 
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