The 2012 MacBook Air (11 & 13-inch) Review

GPU Performance

All of the 2012 MacBook Air models use Intel's HD 4000 processor graphics. Similar to last year, there's no discrete GPU option. In these thermally constrained environments, Intel's HD 4000 does its best to shine compared to the 3000. And it delivers.

There's no real difference in GPU performance between the 11 and 13-inch MacBook Air, they both have an HD 4000 on-die and both perform pretty similarly. The bad news is neither is really fast enough to drive higher resolution external displays, but you can get reasonable performance in many of the hot titles on OS X today - at native panel resolution.

Both models deliver over 60 fps in Portal 2 at 1280 x 800. More important is the fact that the 2012 MacBook Air finally delivers better GPU performance, across the board, than the 2010 MacBook Air did with its off-processor NVIDIA GPU.

Similarly strong performance is available under Half Life 2 Episode Two.

Starcraft 2 shows very little progress over the 2011 MacBook Air in the GPU tests, mostly because we're actually CPU limited here. These benchmarks only end up GPU bound at higher resolutions it seems.

In a further bout of backwardness, our SC2 CPU tests end up being more GPU bound on the MacBook Air which yields significant performance improvements. Unfortunately neither SC2 benchmark provides particularly good results for the HD 4000.

Remember that challenge for a FRAPS equivalent in OS X from the rMBP review?

I played through about an hour of Diablo III on the 13-inch MacBook Air at native resolution and at high quality settings (no AA). The game is playable on the machine, however it is far from smooth. I averaged 17.7 fps throughout my play test, with frame rates dropping as low as 7 fps with lots of baddies and explosions on the screen. It's workable in a pinch, but not ideal. If you really care about gaming on your Mac you'll need to go Pro.