I3-330M and i5-430M NFS: Shift

Why don't you install the game and run it to find out? Unless you don't have it currently.

The video card is a low end card. Don't expect to be playing at the best settings.

The system requirements for the CPU seem pretty low so I would hazard a guess at this game being more GPU intensive and your i3 not making much of a difference, if at all. Unless you enable physX. With an ATI GPU, all physX stuff will be rendered with the CPU. I think there might be a patch to help with that though.

The guy on youtube is running the game on the monitor's native resolution on medium settings with some things turned down and AA turned off. If he's legit, I would expect you to be able to do the same. He also said in the comments that he had to lower the resolution on order to get 50FPS.

Thanks for a detailed answer. But I am a newbie in stuff like that so please correct me if i am wrong but does that mean the cpu can help the graphics card if it doest catch up with the cpu?

"Unless you enable physX. With an ATI GPU, all physX stuff will be rendered with the CPU"

PhysX is proprietary stuff Nvidia has. Some games use it for "nicer" physics effects. Because Nvidia owns it, ATI does not have access to the code. So they cannot design their cards or drivers to process physX. So only the Nvidia cards can render the PhysX stuff. Because the ATI cards cannot, as opposed to not working, physX is rendered by the CPU. This is much less efficient. My advice it to turn off physX if you do not have an Nvidia Geforce 8 series or better card. Some games do not allow this but you can still turn physX settings to minimum and it should be fine.

Need for Speed: Shift is listed as having physX:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX

Thanks.