Laptop Graphics Card requirements for MS FlightSim 2002PE

[gabu]

I'm seriously thinking of buying a Laptop for MS FlightSimulator 2002PE just to practice Instrument procedures for my IR rating etc.

I have a lap top scoped but the Flight Sim package says a 8MB accelerated graphics cards. Will the following specification of the laptops graphics card will be suitable.

- AGP V2.0 Compliant and AGP4X support
- Programmable frame buffer size form 8mb up to 64mb
- Built-in high performance 256-bit 3D engine
- Hardware DVD accelerator
- Built-in direct draw accelerator
- Built-in NTSC/PAL (Chrintel 7017)

The manufacturers provide this information and are non commital, as you'd expect.

Help would be deeply appreciated.

Regards

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

gabu,

The best option for Notebook Graphics is the ATI Mobility Radeon 9600.

Here is a good article from Anand Tech which is well worth the read:

ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 and NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5650: Taking on DX9 (http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.html?i=1866)

Take Care,

Richard

[Jet A1]

I recently upgraded my old battered laptop to a shing Sony...It has the ATI 9600 mobility chip (64mb-128mb user defined) and using Fs2002 I get around 25-35 frames per sec when using the B737 or A320/330 add-ons, which is more-or-less liquid speed....Very pleased compared to my last effort which had a S3 Savage chip (32mb shared) ! That averaged 8 frames per sec which meant it was all very jerky and stuttered at 50 feet as it updted itself ! Annoying !

Best if luck with your decision.....

[BoeingBoy]

I run a Medion laptop with a Pent. 4 2gig processor, a twenty Gb hard drive, windows xp home and a 32mb ATI Radeon graphics card. 512mb of DDR memory helps a lot!

FS2002 with Wilco publishing's 767 PIC runs perfectly smoothly and I find that if you are not looking for scorching external graphic scenes then this fit will be fine.

For IR work having lots of memory and a sophisticated IR program should be enough, but an 8mb graphics card is whoefully low for today's flight sims.

Whatever you choose make sure you can add memory easily and that your laptop has a separate graphics card, and not the 'shared graphics' that are favoured by Sony and some budget models.

Happy Simming.