Alienware M18x R2 Gaming Laptop: Dual GPUs Attack


Gamin Performance: Lost Planet 2, Aliens vs Predator, & Batman: Arkham City

Lost Planet 2
DX11 Gaming Performance

 
Lost Planet 2

A follow-up to Capcom’s Lost Planet : Extreme Condition, Lost Planet 2 is a third person shooter that takes place again on E.D.N. III ten years after the story line of the first title. We ran the game’s DX11 mode which makes heavy use of DX11 Tessellation and Displacement mapping and soft shadows. There are also areas of the game that make use of DX11 DirectCompute for things like wave simulation in areas with water. This is one game engine that looks significantly different in DX11 mode when you compare certain environmental elements and character rendering in its DX9 mode versus DX11. We used the Test B option built into the benchmark tool and with all graphics options set to their High Quality values.


We consider Lost Planet 2 to be one of the more important benchmarks when evaluating gaming performance because it does a great job of highlighting the cream of the crop. It wasn't that long ago when an Alienware system struggled to push out playable framerates in this test but with the M18x R2, there's horsepower to spare.

Alien vs. Predator
DirectX 11 Gaming Performance


Alien vs. Predator

The Alien vs. Predator benchmark makes use of the advanced Tessellation, screen space ambient occlusion and high-quality shadow features, available with DirectX 11. In addition to enabling all of the aforementioned DirectX 11 related features offered by this benchmark, we also switched on 4X anti-aliasing along with 16X anisotropic filtering to more heavily tax the graphics cards being tested.

It's going to be another generation or so before a system can creep past 100fps at 1920x1080 with all the eye candy and DX11 features turn on in this benchmark but the M18x R2 keeps it silky smooth at almost 70fps even with 4X AA on.

Batman: Arkham City
DirectX Gaming Performance


Batman: Arkham City

Batman: Arkham City is a sequel to 2009’s Game of the Year winning Batman: Arkham Asylum. This recently released sequel, however, lives up to and even surpasses the original. The story takes place 18 months after the original game. Quincy Sharp, the onetime administrator of Arkham Asylum, has become mayor and convinced Gotham to create "Arkham City" by walling off the worst, most crime-ridden areas of the city and turning the area into a giant open-air prison. The game has DirectX 9 and 11 rendering paths, with support for tessellation, multi-view soft shadows, and ambient occlusion. We tested in DX11 mode with all in-game graphical options set to their maximum values, at various resolutions.

Batman: Arkham City is another one that we recently added to the fold. In this test, the M18x R2 is able to blow past 100fps with IQ settings cranked up.


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