How good are GMA HD integrated graphics?

Im considering getting a notebook without a dedicated video card but I want to know just how powerful the GMA HD is. Its the one on the i5 460m. I had an old AMD notebook with ATI radeon X1200 series and it couldnt play 720p videos, they just kept stuttering. Would the integrated graphics be worse? What video card (Nvidia or ATI) can I use for comparison? I dont play games at all, but I do watch videos and edit photos. And yes. I know Sandy Bridge has better graphics but thats not what im asking

 

My previous Dell laptop had an Intel HD4500M. It played Blu-ray movies on an external 1920 x 1080 monitor perfectly with using ArcSoft Total Media Theater 3 and Dell version of PowerDVD. And I used Photoshop Elements 8 and Acdsee Pro for photo editing. No problems.

 

My intel 4500 hd notebook plays hd videos with no stuttering

And half life engine games. And strategy games like civ 5.

 

Intel GMA will not play the latest and greatest games above like 1280x800, at least smoothly. I have a friend who managed to play Day of Defeat Source (based of HL2 engine) at 1368x768 (low detail) with playable frame rates on his Acer Timeline. I haven't tried it on my Latitude 13

I can play basic Flash and Java based games just fine with my Latitude 13's 4500MHD, video playback is smooth as well.

 

Well I have 4 gb of ram in dual channel and a 2.1 ghz dual core cpu

that makes a difference.

I can play hl2 games like portal pretty much maxxed out at 60 fps.

High detail. Low detail it goes to the 100 something frame rate.

Someday if I keep this thing Im going to put the p8700 in my g72 into it and see if that makes it rock.

I acttually envision turning it into a psx emulator machine

Intel drivers make a huge difference btw.

 

Why is it that everyone seems to think a "lowly" Intel card can't DISPLAY HD video? Today's cards can do the grunt work but before they could always display whatever was sent to it. The GPU was only responsible for scaling it.

My Thinkpad T410s with Intel "HD" Graphics can display high res files all day long. It's usually about the CPU rather than the GPU in cases where it doesn't have hardware acceleration built in.

 

Intel HD Integrated Graphics are perfectly capable for HD movies, my sister has this in her laptop (Dell Latitude E6410) and reported no problems. My 3 year old ThinkPad T61 with Intel X3100 graphics (thats 2 generations old compared to Intel HD) also plays HD movies fine.

Due to the nature of integrated graphics you have to bear in mind that the CPU need to have SSE4 instructions at least for smooth playback. This was introduced since the Penryn Core 2 Duo's, the Core i's will have this instruction and therefore wouldn't be a problem.

 

I havent really ran into anything i cant do yet that includes HD movies,games,ect.......

 

admittedly i only played 720p hd movies on its own screen I just doubt it would have a problem with full hd

 

HD video playback really depends a lot on the video and the software used. For example I can play downloaded 720p youtube videos just fine in vlc on my 5 year old 1.4 GHz Celeron-M.