Amd radeon hd 6650m graphics card

[Varo88]

with up to 2048 mb of dedicated DDR3 VRAM, system bus/cache memory 3mb L3,, I am told this is a discrete graphics card but I am unfamiliar with most of this terminology. Would this be a good card for SL?

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Depends on what you think is "good".  The card is a discrete card that is about mid range in peformance for the AMD/ATI 6600 series.  You should have no trouble with SL at mid to high levels......ultra will probably give it a little trouble (but ultra will give almost any card trouble that is less than the top level in performance).

 

The "M" designation says it's going into a laptop computer.  And it appears you haven't purchased this computer yet.  If you are looking at the computer with that card in it find out if the CPU the computer comes with has an on chip graphic chipset built into it.  Those CPU's have a feature called "auto-switching"..........that that causes many people problems because the auto-switching doesn't always work as advertised (in fact, more often than not it completely fails with programs that use OpenGL for graphics rendering......which SL does use).  Get a computer without the on chip graphics......even if it's an older Core 2 series.  Any CPU with a clock speed of 2 gigs or higher will run SL (and almost every other program available) quite well.  If you do a lot of multi-tasking when not in SL the look at the quad core CPU but stay away for any CPU that has an on chip grahics chipset..........wait until Intel and AMD get that technology figured out so that it works like it's supposed to work.