Battlefield 2 on Atom N270 - powerful enough?

I am thinking of getting an Acer Revo R3600 , it has a Atom 1.6 230 cpu and a Nvidia 9400m and 2gb of ddr2 667

Will this play BF2 on Max detail and minimum antialiasing.

The Atom 1.6 230 gets the same passmark score as the Atom N270 1.6

Thanks.

http://www.acer.co.uk/acer/seu30e.do?LanguageISOCtxParam=en&link=ln374e&CountryISOCtxParam=UK&acond125e=61300&kcond48e.c2att101=61300&sp=page17e&ctx1g.c2att92=242&ctx2.c2att1=17&ctx1.att21k=1&CRC=3593818478

 

Errr...with a 9400. I think it'd struggle because of that let alone anything else. I mean I know its not THAT demanding a game, but it doesnt run on free will, it could bog down at busy times back on my old X1900XT a few years ago which was about 2-3x faster than that 9400m easily (admittedly at high res), the atom will only make it worse.

Medium settings, no AA might be/remain playable, moderate resolution (1280x800/1024x768). Recommended specs for this game were still in the 6800GT/X800 region though, and Im pretty sure the 9400 isn't up to that.

It'll definately play it, and reasonably on moderate settings, just dont go expecting the earth, the 9400 isnt exactly a speedy GPU.

 

I tested battlefield on an Everun Note that had a Dual Core 1.2 Ghz AMD CPU and side port memory. With everything on low I was getting 12-15 fps max. I really doubt it will play at max detail on the Netbook you mentioned, maybe medium though.

 

Here is some videos of it on a Asus n10 with the 9300m GS and Atom 270, 1.6 GHz....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ecxky9cSgI&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGhGVbTJg3s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrTE1ccqZ4M



you could also build one yourself..

since it's a mini atx, you could build a little awesomeness machine.

Atom N330 1.6GHz Dual-Core 441 NVIDIA ION Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813500027 )

4 GB SDRAM DDR2 800 MHz: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231207

640 GB Harddrive 7200 RPM: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136319

Silverstone Sugo chassis: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811163112

all in all 403 dollars, around the same price as the revo. Just need a minimalistic keyboard and windows.

And this config will give you twice the ram, faster hard drive(and much more storage) but most importantly you get Dual Core Atom contra the Atom in the Acer Revo.



I do not think it's the 9400m that is the problem for BF2. here is the macbook with the 9400m playing BF2 in 1280x800 with everything on high and 100% viewing distance.. it looks smooth and great: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z8jmaS74kQ


therefore we must conclude(obviously) that its the Atom that is the problem and not the 9400m. The 9400m is more than capable of doing it...

I wonder more about a dual core atom?


but instead of getting an Acer Revo you should TOTALLY build your own tiny little micro-atx gaming rig

 

BF2's engine is notoriously finicky. It "requires" a 1.7 GHz P4 and I believe it was the low clock speed in the Turion x2 1.8 GHz I had in the HP I use to have that I think kept making BF2 crash. Since it's a single core only game, I think it got overloaded on the single core during high levels of orchestration, the game would always crash during close by artillery or air strikes, but infantry only servers ran just fine. Higher level graphics also seemed to crash the game too, since the HP had a shared + dedicated VRAM setup (64 MB dedicated + 192 MB shared, BF2 requires 128 MB VRAM). I think that hybrid set up possibly conflicted with the game at times, though the previous machine I had, did not have that issue with BF2 since it had a Mobility Radeon X600 with 64 MB dedicated + 64 shared VRAM. Funny how upgrading to a more powerful computer can screw you over.

 

I used to play bf2 on my gateway it had 1.8ghz P4 768mb ram and a radeon 9250 and i played on all low

 

I played BF2 on my Asus N10J with Atom N270 CPU overclocked to 2.0GHz and 9300m GS GPU memory overclocked by about 100MHz. It ran well at 800x600 with low detail but maximum distance. Distance is most important on most maps, and detail really doesn't matter to be honest. It ran reasonably well at 25-30 fps, with occasional dips to 12-15. Quite impressive honestly. I am quite disappointed though that it won't run on my Acer 1410 which has a much more powerful CPU, and the GPU is a 4500MHD which I know can run BF2, but apparently needs a much better CPU.

 

I played BF2 on my laptop in the sig. with Geforce 7400 Go. It's an old and weak card, but I played it with High/Medium graphics settings, except for the shadow and dynamic lighting, I have them turned off. Even with 100% view distance, I still got pretty good playable frame rate.

So as long as you turn off Shadow, Lighting, no AA, or any other fancy effects, you should be fine, it's the CPU that you should be worried about.

 

Thanks for the excellent info