Well i finally decided to go with linux for my laptop but now im getting very unplayable frame rates on Gmod and TF2. I use to be able to play them on the highest setting with very playable frame rates but now its barely playable. If anyone knows of any drivers for intel hd graphics for mint it would be appreciated.
The Intel Mesa drivers are open source and pulled into the linux kernel, there is no driver to be installed, there is also no performance gain to be had by installing anything, and the performance level should be right up there with the Windows drivers, except for Haswell chips. However, TF2 should run faster in Linux than on Windows, so you probably have another problem, which is quite probable because Mint is Ubuntu-based, and Ubuntu is a mess. Did you also try with a major GNU/Linux distro, or only with Ubuntu-Mint? If you're running Cinnamon, your system will suffer, Cinnamon is not mature enough yet and really slows down a system, about as much as Unity. Maybe try with MATE, that should be faster in Mint.
In my opinion, you should really think about installing Manjaro 0.8.7, it will be a lot faster, stable, and more functional than Mint, and Steam will be pre-installed and pre-configured. Why Manjaro, well, because it uses a port of the Mint GUI installer, so you'll already be familiar with the install process having installed Mint, and also because Manjaro is not only a very good general purpose distro based on Arch and compatible with the AUR, it's also the ideal gaming distro, and it uses a much newer kernel than Mint and you can switch kernels on-the-fly, so that you can always have the latest kernel with the best intel graphics performance.
Ok thanks i'll look into manjaro. I tried it with mate, cinnamon and ubuntu but i liked the design of cinnamon the best.