Changing graphics cards.

[darklord63]

Now that PR:ARMA 2 is out I think i need a new graphics card. First off what is the minimum graphics card I can use to replace my current one with to play ARMA 2 on all HIGH settings. Secondly and more important, can I even replace my graphics card? I'm not sure if it's possible to replace a graphics card on the laptop I'm using.
The Dell Online Store: Build Your System
I'm using a Dell studio 15, and have ATI mobility Radeon HD 3450. Also can anyone tell me where to find the new drivers for this card. I can't find them anywhere.

Thanks

[SnipingCoward]

You might have luck finding your drivers here: NVIDIA & Laptop News | Latest NVIDIA drivers and related news | laptopvideo2go.com
although this is mainly directed to wards nVidia cards there also are ATI drivers for notbooks from what I had seen.

Note: Replacing the video card (usually opening the notebook also) will void your warranty!

also after 1min of googling I found this: Possible to upgrade Studio 15 graphics card?

[SocketMan]

I am afraid that even the top-end card (5470) for that laptop is not enough to play arma2,
3850 (320 shaders/256bit memory) is the minimum recommended,and they're not
kidding about the minimum.


ATI Radeon™ HD 3400 Series GPU Specifications

181 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
64-bit DDR2/GDDR3 memory interface
Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
Shader Model 4.1
32-bit floating point texture filtering
Indexed cube map arrays
Independent blend modes per render target
Pixel coverage sample masking
Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
Gather4 texture fetching
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
40 stream processing units


*************************************************************************
ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 5470 GPU Specifications
292 million 40nm transistors
TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture
80 Stream Processing Units
8 Texture Units
16 Z/Stencil ROP Units
4 Color ROP Units
GDDR5/DDR3 memory interface
PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface
DirectX® 11 support
Shader Model 5.0
DirectCompute 11
Programmable hardware tessellation unit
Accelerated multi-threading
HDR texture compression
Order-independent transparency




ATI Mobility Radeonâ„¢ HD 5470 GPU Specifications

ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 3400 Series GPU Specifications

As far as the laptops go in general -there is a (relatively) new technology called
XGP -which is basically a box with a GPU in it,but it is not widespread just yet.


ATI XGPâ„¢ Technology

YouTube - ATI XGP (eXternal Graphics Platform) Radeon 5830 Demo At CES 2010

[boilerrat]

Your best bet would to splurge on a desktop if you want to play ARMA2 R.

[PuffNStuff]

go to ati.com, support, drivers.