A friend of mine asked how well would Counter Strike: Global Offensive would perform on a MacBook Air with the Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics. Now, the Intel HD 4000 has been touted as a significant over its much-maligned predecessor the HD 3000 and althought the HD 4000 doesn’t reach the lofty heights set by AMD’s Llano solution, benchmarks done by online publications such as Anandtech seem to prove that Intel is back in the ball game in the aspect of integrated graphics.

So in order to satisfy my friend’s curiousity, I set out to run Counter Strike: GO on a current generation MacBook Pro, equipped with an Intel Ivy Bridge i5 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and the Intel HD 4000. I set most of the graphical settings to high (I don’t usually do this, preferring performance rather than bells and whistles), and started a game with bots.

The game ran pretty well actually, at about 40 + to 50 + FPS and it looked beautiful, although I still think that the screenshots on Steam looked like they’ve been taken from another game :P.

On the the matter of Counter Strike: GO, I’m looking for an affordable gaming mouse that runs well on the Mac. I don’t think I’m doing myself a disservice playing the game with the Magic Mouse (it has a decent weight, and my stats are pretty decent…I think…against bots..) but all these weapons switching about due to brushing against the “invisible” scroll button has to stop before I embarrass myself. So suggestions people, or better still, a review unit or two :P.