Actually, a GT 740M is way behind a 5770 in performance.
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
933 vs 1677
That means a 5770 is almost twice as good. That 5770 is also 2 generations old. We are on 7770s now and nearly on 8770s. That makes you 3+ generations behind.
- Edit - I just wanted to throw it out there that a 5770 isn't a real gamer's card. That is the bare minimum for someone with next to no budget. That is the sort of level that people get when they use PS3s. That level of power is a joke for serious PC gamers and yours is at roughly half of that.
Laptops aren't made for gaming and any gaming problem a laptop has is pretty easy to blame on it just being a laptop.
The thing with FE in particular, I am pretty sure I read somewhere that it uses GPGPU to allow the video card (usually equal to 20+ processors) to handle certain tasks. That obviously only works for new video cards because it wasn't invented until a few years ago and I am pretty sure cute little expansion video cards for laptops wouldn't have it even if they were new.
When GPGPU isn't there, the tasks remain on the processor. I am going to hazard a guess and say that FE probably isn't even programmed to take advantage of multi-threading. If it isn't, as I suspect, that would push everything onto your two powered down main laptop processor cores.
If you know as much about system specs as you say you do, you would know that i5 or whatever in a laptop isn't the same as i5 in a desktop and even in a desktop i5 really doesn't say that much about processing power. The difference in processing power between one sort of i5 and another sort of i5 can be pretty huge. When Intel calls a laptop processor an i5 what they really mean is that it was designed using available technology when they were making i5 processors for desktops. That in no way makes a laptop i5 the same as a desktop i5.
It should be pretty easy to tell what is bottlenecking you. Just load up HWMonitor or something similar and play the game and watch what happens. Or even just tab out of the game and bring up the task manager.
I can tell you for sure that this game will use up 40% of what my 3570k is capable of putting out.
If you look here http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php you will see that a 3570k puts out 7109 processing "units". Forty percent of that is 2844. Your processor is at 4110 total "units". Mine doesn't have Hyper Threading. My numbers are from real cores, not virtual cores. Your numbers are using virtual cores. Those each add about 50% of what another core would add. So your hyperthreading disabled performance from main cores only is more like 2740.
If it can use 2844 of my "units" and your maximum available "units" are 2740, you do the math. When you do that math, add in allowances for all the other processes your computer has operational. While you are doing that math, also don't forget that my video card is a serious desktop card with GPGPU active while yours is a scaled down laptop card with probably about zero GPGPU capability.
ATI vs Nvidia... Games tend to be tuned for one or the other primarily and I really don't know which one FE/LH is tuned for, but the difference can be a decent chunk, but probably not more than 10 or 20% for cards of the same power level. I would hazard a guess that isn't making a big difference in your case, but it could potentially be kicking you when you are down. As for newer cards being worse, they tend to be pretty brute force kind of devices. Aside from stability issues newer is usually better. If you don't want to crash all the time it's not a horrible idea to stick with older cards that have had more driver testing and bug fixing, but I highly doubt that is the problem here if your video card is 3+ generations old.
If you are going to come in here and ask what your problem is, at least listen to what people are telling you. Otherwise what is the point?
