I'm looking at acquiring a well-priced laptop with a good graphics card with dedicated memory. The best I've found out here is a Packard Bell ML61, which includes the Radeon HD 3470 with 256mb of RAM. Compared to my current laptop (and even compared to my current desktop), this laptop sounds like a definite upgrade, with the graphics card rating about twice as high on most benchmarks that I can find than the Mobility Radeon 9700 on my laptop.
However, I know graphics cards can be very chancey things. Does anyone have direct experience of this graphics card and its general performance? In particular with basic shaders and Windlight atmosphere shaders, and even the experimental shadow stuff (my understanding is that the 3470 supports it). I'd also be interested in knowing what experiences people have had with using it with one of the optimized third-party viewers (such as Rainbow Viewer, Cool Viewer, Emerald viewer, and Shadowdraft) and also with Snowglobe (whose superior texture handling strikes me as something that should be particularly helpful on laptops).
Thanks.