Apple goes Nvidia with MacBooks

The day we gamers have been waiting for is finally here -- Apple is announcing at their event right now that the new MacBooks (and presumably Pros) that they'll be releasing will have Nvidia graphics chips inside them, finally replacing the integrated graphics chips that have been the bane of 3D gamers on the Mac for years and years. The "NVIDIA GeForce 9400 M" boasts 16 parallel graphic cores, and 54gflops of graphics performance.

This couldn't be better news for Mac gamers -- The new chips offer 6x the performance in terms of 3D graphics that the old chips did, and while that level of 3D performance probably still won't be able to go toe-to-toe with the very fastest of 3D gaming PC rigs, it does mean that World of Warcraft and all of the other popular 3D games on the Mac will run faster than ever before.

Update: Looks like that's not the only chip in there -- the Nvidia 9600M GT will offer more power (and less battery life), and it looks like both will be included on the MBP, with an option for double the graphics memory.