You will run into a quadzillion different responses for this question. Before I purchased my iBook, I was curious as to what kind of performance I would get with a few games that I though would be good on the Notebook. Some people would say "works great", and yet others would say "laggy" still others "my iBook runs Far Cry at 45 FPS with 2xFSAA and 2xAA". Everyone tends to just say whatever the **** they want with it. Some peoples are flat out satisfied with choppy graphics and lagging framerates. I now have the 1 GHz iBook in my hand (I am typing this on it)....and while I can't talk about every game's framerate performance, I can tell you that you don't want to buy an iBook for gaming purposes! Of course, you shouldn't really buy any laptop if you are a mad gamer (unless you call those giant pieces of plastic that they sell in the Wintel world - those that weigh like 12 lbs or something! - laptops/notebooks!) But don't get me wrong, it doesn't mean the iBook can't do games! I installed Warcraft 3 on the thing, and so far it works beautiful with good framerates (I need to put a tool like FRAPS on this thing to get good numbers though - don't know of a similar tool for MAC though!), but then I installed the Command and Conquer: Generals Demo, and just found it to be excruciating slow on my system (I ran it at 800x600 rez with "low" as the setting!). Waiting for the first set of troopers you get in the training mission to run from point A to B was a test of patience! I haven't yet played a FPS style game yet (like UT). I have heard UT2003 runs ok, but I can't imagine UT2004 playing well on this machine, it just doesn't have the resources. I can tell you that the 12 inch's upgrade of processor speed helps significantly with graphics though. The 800 MHz version struggled with the installed Tony Hawk game, but this 1 GHz machine runs it pretty well (with graphical settings bumped down of course!).
This is just my opinion of course, I will be downloading other demos and such to satisfy my curiousity on this situation, but I find my biggest excitement comes from be able to play some of the older strategy games at very acceptable levels. Warcraft was a game I originally bought for my desktop PC when it first came out, but I just never played it! And the whole problem is not necessarily the lack of horsepower under the iBook's hood, but rather, the port from the PC world to the MAC. Warcraft 3 is a beautiful game, sporting just as much detail as the slightly newer C and C: Generals, but yet the former runs so much better. Perhaps this is because Blizzard actually made their disks with both installation mediums on board, so we have the quality of the original manufacturer thrown in. Anyways, this got much longer then expected, hope it helps a little!
