WILL MY LAPTOP RUN Battlefield 3, Arma 3, latest games etc

Hey, I have a

Lenovo Y470 14 inch

i7 2630-QM (2.00ghz)
8GB DDR3 RAM
500GB 7200rpm HDD
Nvidia GT 550M
Windows 7 Home Premium


What settings will I be able to run BF3, ARMA 3 etc at?

It currently runs every game at max except for Far Cry 2 (No AA), Crysis (everything Gamer), Bulletstorm (Some stuff turned down one from max), and ARMA 2 Free (Everything turned to medium-low :-\)

 

i dont know the specs for arma 3, but for BF3, probably low to med. high settings. you wont be able to max it out though...

 

Need 580m or 485m 6870m or 6990m

Full 1920x1080 you might even need SLI or Crossfire!

 

Yes, you will definitely be able to run the games you listed, the only question is how well will it run. 550M is quite a capable mid-range card, it is suitable for gaming up to 900P however, just don't expect it to run the latest games at 1080p smoothly.

 

If you're not using an external monitor, the 550M should be enough to run BF3 at medium details, no AA/AF at the Y470's native 1366x768 resolution.

 

You can run games at 1080p if you turn the settings down.

 

what? lmao, i dont think i fully understand your statement.

so, "provided a computer has a video card", that means it will run the game?!?! where have you been all my life...

But on a second note, here are the specs for the actual game (Battlefield 3):

 

ArmA 3? NEVER.

I have read an article a few months ago, it spoke about DX11 implementation and I remember that the minimum specs were out of the roof!

Here we go, found the article : ARMA 3 announced | bit-gamer.net

RAM: 2GB
CPU: Intel Core i5 or AMD Athlon Phenom X4 or faster
Graphics: Nvidia Geforce GTX 260 or ATI Radeon HD 5770 with Shader Model 3 and 896 MB VRAM
Other: DirectX 10 minimum

That's MINIMUM

 

Woops, double post.

 

Recommend =\= maxed out...

 

Whoa. My laptop should at least meet minimum, lol. Although I was not a big fan of ArmA 2, but this one looks spectacular. Maybe will have to update my desktop GPU though. Eyeballing a GTX 570. It's either that or a new camera...

Although think I will go back and finish Operation Flashpoint 2. I actually quite enjoyed it despite what everyone else was griping about.

 

It should be able to run BF3 at least. May not be playing at max settings though

 

You realize that that is a DESKTOP gtx260 and those are 'about' 2x as fast as your 550m....



On my m860tu with t9600/fx3700(gtx280) the BF3 alpha was barely playable in low settings...

 

Yes I do realize that, and I don't have a 550m. I have a Radeon 6750m, which when overclocked gets about GTX 460m performance. But in any case it should suffice at 720p.

 

quote fail...

 

I will play on my laptop screen's native resolution, 1366*768.

What settings would I be able to get? Hopefully high with no AA/AF.

I will play it nearly maxed out on my 1920*1080 monitor once I attach my desktop GTX 570 to my laptop.

 

You can pull BF3 off with that res. But as I said, forget about ArmA III

 

High no AA/AF? Would be nice if I could have high/maxed out details but no AA/AF (I don't really see the difference in them anyways)


And yeah, ARMA 2 seems to run on a very inefficient engine. I can only get smooth rates on ARMA 2 Free if I crank everything to med/low -_-

 

BF3?

At that res, med-low, no AA/AF, no bloom, no DOF, DX10. You'll be lucky to get 60 FPS, you'll avg 30.

 

I mean, BF3 settings on my laptop screen, which is 1366*768.


I will only try and run BF3 on my 1920*1080 once I hook up a GTX 570 to my laptop

 

Those are the settings in that post...

Even if you hook up the GTX570, you will have around a 50% drop in performance due to bottlenecking in the memory bandwidth ( ask nando4 for more info, he's the expert in ViDock ).

 

Really? 1366*768 but only low-med with my laptop's GT 550m? :-\


Bottlenecking is a much smaller issue for my laptop because I am using an SB notebook with Optimus on x1 2.0 pci-e bandwidth. I'm expecting about 20% bottleneck maybe, and around 20k+ 3dmark.

 

A normal GPU has x16 link. You'll have x1 (?). I am not sure about the results, but I think you'll only get 15k tops.

And yes, it requires a DESKTOP 6950 to play at MEDIUM settings. So yeah.

 

Damn, it says recommended GFX card is 6950 or GTX560 >_<

BTW, someone had a Dell XPS 15 with a SB 2720QM, 8GB RAM, no Optimus and a Radeon 5870, and got 18k 3dmark06.

 

Its not really memory bandwidth, as memory bandwidth with video cards refers to the speed of the internal GPU memory and how fast it can communicate with the GPU cores themselves. The limitation of the eGPU is CPU-->GPU communication. I honestly have no clue how well such a setup will do with BF3, but I hope that it is at least playable.

My external GTX 560 Ti with x1 optimus produces a playable experience in BC2 multiplayer on high settings (the video settings are largely irrelevant to the FPS I get because of the bottleneck though), so hopefully even though BF3 may be more intensive it will also be more PC optimized and not need to use this CPU-GPU communication as much; it seems like many games that were made for PC originally are more GPU bound whereas BC2 is unecessarily CPU bound because it was was designed on consoles first.


One can only hope... I guess I will find out in about a week or so either way...

 

BF3 alpha was fine on the m14x at 30-45fps on highest detail @ 1366x768. Beta next week will show the same im sure. At this point, the I5 folks may not be happy about their purchase as the I5 thread at another tech site showed 10fps difference in Bad Company 2 (I5 vs I7 m14x)

 

Over 100 different changes were implemented from Alpha to Beta. So I doubt it will be the same.

 

Well Alpha is just fresh code, pretty much zero optimizations. You can usually expect a significant improvement in performance come beta and likely more at launch.

 

^^This was what I was hoping to hear. If I disable AA and AF, hopefully I can get it running smoothly.

 

I hope this is true, because I can't very well swap out my i5 for an i7... Hopefully it will be happy with 2 cores + hyperthreading.

 

Well I think at best it will run as well as Bad Company 2, which was also quad core hungry. I think BF3 will tax it a little more.

 

Wow, I didn't know that the performance difference between the GT 550m and the Radeon 6750m was so big. I would have gotten a laptop with the 6750m if there was a 14 >= inch laptop with it and a quad core processor instead of a dual core. 6000 passmark for a 2630QM vs 3900 passmark for a 2620M -_-