[fsphiladelphia]

Anyone out there have any experience with the Mobility Radeon 5470 and FSO?  Specifically, I'm thinking of picking up an HP dm4t with the Mobility Radeon 5470 with 1GB of RAM but I'm concerned about performance.  I don't intend to play any games on the laptop other than FSO.

My old desktop died, but as you can see in my signature, I was working with a 7600 GT, which, while not even the best card from its own time, seems to benchmark higher than the Mobility 5470 I'm considering going to.  On the other hand, my old video card only had 256 MB of RAM and the new one, despite lower benchmarks, would have 1 GB.

I'm also wondering if the i5 and 4 GB of ram in the new laptop would offset the potntial downgrade from going to the 5470 card.

Thoughts?

http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Mobility-Radeon-HD-5470.23698.0.html

Here's the link to the writeup on notebookcheck - you guys think this card will get the job done or should I be looking for something a little brawnier?

[Kolgena]

It's pretty weak, but should run FSO+mediavps maxed out at medium resolutions fine.

[Klaustrophobia]

amount of ram on a video card is not really correlated to performance.  it just needs to have enough to do its job.  rendering high resolutions and lots of textures is what eats up video ram.  if you have enough, more doesn't do anything for you.  the mobility will have more and newer features like the latest shaders, but as noted in the benchmarks, lacks in raw horsepower.  as for if the rest of the system can make up for it, that will depend on how FSO uses system resources - i.e., does it depend heavily on the GPU or CPU.  that's a question for the coders probably, i can't answer it.  is a laptop a necessity? 

[fsphiladelphia]

Thanks for the replies.  I'm going from desktop to laptop because my desktop fried and in my new apartment there's nowhere for me to put a new desktop.  I've been considering various models and have it narrowed to the HP dm4t which has the Mobility Radeon 5470 and the HP Envy 14 which has the Mobility Radeon 5650.  I know that the 5650 is a vastly superior card and will run FSO no problem.  However, the Envy 14 is 5.2 lbs and the Dm4t is 4.4 lbs, which is a significant difference for a laptop.

Is there anyone out there who knows what impact the core i5 and increased system ram will have?  Ie: can I pick up the slack from the video card with better overall system config - or will the 5470 essentially hamstring/bottleneck FSO?

[The E]

On a system like that, CPU performance will be a far greater bottleneck than GPU performance. So getting a faster CPU and more RAM will be good.

[fsphiladelphia]

So, if I do elect to go with the lighter laptop which has the weaker video card, I should consider going for a somewhat quicker i5.  I was already considering putting 8GB of ram in the thing as well.

I was wondering about video ram amounts, as well.  Going from 512MB to 1GB is a pricey upgrade, and I read this:

DirectX 11 support, which the chip is just too slow to make use of. The 5470 is outfitted as well as you could hope for, with a 675MHz core clock and GDDR3, but 1GB of video memory is wasteful on a GPU this weak.

The 5470 is also not the default GPU; it's a punishingly expensive $160 upgrade. A step below it at a still irritating $85 is the Mobility Radeon HD 540v with a more reasonable 512MB of video memory, which is basically just a rebadged Mobility Radeon HD 4570. The $75 premium to add 512MB of additional video memory you'll never use along with DirectX 11 support the chip is too slow to take advantage of is frankly a lousy deal.

 (http://www.anandtech.com/show/3857/dell-studio-14-defining-solid).

If the above is true, would it be pointless to equip this particular video card with the 1GB of video ram if sticking to 512MB is an option?  The above quote is from a review of a different laptop, but should still be relevant given that they're discussing the same video card.  On this particular laptop, moving up from 512MB video ram to 1GB is $75 - but it sounds like that might be a waste if the card won't take advantage of the extra memory.

[S-99]

Ideally, i don't recommend gaming with a laptop unless your filthy rich. A desktop is where serious power and hardware for gaming will always be. You can only change the hardware in a laptop so far which is usually limited to battery, memory, and hard drive.

With an old desktop, as long as you have pcie, you can still get a new video card and plug it in. Then get a newer desktop later and shove that card in it or something.

You can get good mobile video cards inside of laptops, but you pay out the ass for them compared to the desktop equivalent. Good choice with the desktop. I use to have a 7600gt 256mb. Great card, it was a midrange card that was 10% faster than the highest end geforce 6800.

[fsphiladelphia]

Well, ideally I would get a desktop but I just don't have the space for one right now in this apartment.  Since I'm limited to a laptop, I could get something larger/heavier which would accommodate FSO better, but then it wouldn't be much of a laptop, which I'd prefer remain portable, light, etc.  I was hoping to be able to get decent enough performance out of the 5470 card because the laptop it's in is nearly a pound lighter than the next laptop I'd consider which has the 5650 while still keeping the 14" screen size I prefer.  When I move to a new place down the line, perhaps then I can go back to a desktop to keep up with whatever FSO development there has been by then.