Any glitches with Mobility 5870 and FSX AND FS2004?

Hi. I'm overloading myself on researching a desktop replacement/gaming laptop. I will do a lot of FSX as well as FS2004. A lot of performance machines today use the ATI 5870 - which I think is based on the desktop 5770, and is among the most powerful mobile cards currently available. I am sure it is more than enough for my interests.

Generally speaking, nVidia cards have been regarded as "better" for FS2004 (aka FS9) and FSX. I vaguely recall hearing about display glitches with ATI cards. What I would really like to know is if this is still the case with the current mobile 58xx series. I'm getting the impression that it's not always as easy to switch between nVidia and ATI in laptops as it is in desktops (restrictive BIOS from manufacturers, fewer drivers, etc) so depending on what I get I might not be able to switch from one to the other if I wanted to.

So - if anyone reads this and has experience with any of the current ATI 57xx or 58xx cards specifically with FSX and FS9, I would really like to know how they are working together. It is not a question of memory or GPU speed (FS is much more CPU bound), but of "glitch and anomaly free" display of the game.

 

I've got the G73 with the 5870, and it's been just fine with FSX. I have read that the ATI's don't perform quite as well speed wise in FSX as the Nvidia counterpart, but having played with both, as you have stated, CPU is more important and the 5870 has performed just fine.

I'd be curious is there is a particular issue, be happy to check it for you.

 

Hi, thanks for replying. Well, if you wouldn't mind checking a couple of things - sure. I'm kind of going on things I've read in variousl forums - I'm still on FS2004 on my old desktop, and have held off on FSX until I get a new system that has a better chance of running it at least "decent".

Most of the things I've read are not really speed related, but texture "shimmer" seems to come up a lot. I think it's like a sparkling kind of effect (but not an "effect" like an enhancement that's supposed to be there) that is visible in some ground textures and objects. Also in overcast / heavy cloud situations it supposedly just kills frames down to single digits. I think that's not abnormal for any system running the game but supposedly it's much worse for those with ATI cards. It seems like the flight sim community has been pleading with ATI to help with drives for several years but since MS dumped the dev team they aren't putting any resources into doing anything about it. However I've run across a couple of forum posts that seem to indicate that things might finally be ironed out.

So having not witnessed any of the problems myself, I guess I'm just wondering about anything that looks "buggy" like the shimmering or weird artifacts, stuff like that. Apparently they don't occur on nVidia cards.

You wouldn't happen to have FS2004 as well do you? Even upgrading to FSX, I have a lot of addons in FS2004 and plan to continue using that on the new system as well (finally should be able to max every conceivable option with no performance hit!). I'm wondering if FS2004 being older suffers any incompatibility or such glitches with newer hardware.