The New iMacs and Retina display Macbooks! What to choose?

The new line of Macbooks with Retina Display and iMacs are available now! But what is new and what is important to know when buying one considering gaming and wrappers. The most important and perhaps main thing which effects gaming is the graphics card and bridge which is used. Well lets check the Macbooks first shall we? The main change is the graphicscard. I am quite fan of AMD or Nvidia, but Apple choose for as start models the past few years for the Intel Graphics card. In my opinion worst choice for gaming. The past showed that quite a number of games simply don’t work properly with Intel graphics cards: like Medieval 2 Total War. The main problem are the video drivers or the game doesn’t supporting the card. I think especially with some older games this might conflict with eachother. Anyway, the new Retina display Macbooks have an Intel Iris Graphics card. Which is what in a GFX card review of Gizmodo calls “Awesome!”. They say, i quote: Intel’s Iris graphics are going to provide a 2x improvement to 3D performance over Intel’s current HD 3000, and HD 4000 that are wrapped into Ivy Bridge cores. Which is of course course good news! However, still the question remains: How does older games work with the card? How good are the graphical drivers? That it seems to work great in tests with BioShock Infinite, doesn’t say anything of other and especially some older games… The real physical tests will give the real answers. If someone already has the new Macbook with Intel Iris Graphics cards, he maybe wants to share his experiences with that card in this topic?

Second, the new iMac! I was quite sad to see they are even equiping the new basic iMac with only that (onboard) Intel Iris graphical card instead of an Nvidia or AMD Radeon card. This means, if you want to have an iMac with a Nvidia graphics card you have to pay $200 more, which will give you an 1 GB GeForce GT 750M, what in my opinion is a straight yes and maybe must, in comparation with that Intel Iris Graphicscard which only has 128mb memory on it and the rest it will eat from the physical memory…thats why I am happy that the basic model comes with standard 8GB of internal Memory.

Conclusion: Intel Iris graphics card, should be in improvement, but time will tell the real thing about that one. When having a Retina Display Macbook it should be at least an massive performance boost, so thats a very good thing in comparation with a Intel HD 3000 or HD 4000. For iMacs I would defintly skip the basic model and go for $200 more expensive but more safe side, with the 1 GB Nvidia graphics card.

Feel free to share your experiences in this topic.