Dell Alienware X51, SFF PC Gaming Refined


Lost Planet 2 and Far Cry 2 Benchmarks

FarCry 2 is an aging game title but it's DX10 powered engine still renders gorgeous visuals.  Here we cranked up AA to 8X levels just to clean up pixels a bit more and put a strain on our test systems.

FarCry 2
DX10 Gaming Performance


FarCry 2

Like the original, FarCry 2 is one of the more visually impressive games to be released on the PC to date. Courtesy of the Dunia game engine developed by Ubisoft, FarCry 2's game-play is enhanced by advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, high resolution textures, complex shaders, realistic dynamic lighting, and motion-captured animations. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article with a fully patched version of FarCry 2, using one of the built-in demo runs recorded in the Ranch Map. The test results shown here were run at various resolutions and settings.




Here it's game, set and match for the Alienware X51 machine and this the alien nation took the top spot by a more comfortable margin.  Even at 1920X1080 resolution with 8X AA enabled the X51 maintains solid performance well in excess of playable frame rates.

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.




It's no secret that Lost Planet 2 always seems to favor NVIDIA GPU driven systems and as a result, the X51 once again beats out these full-sized desktop PCs by a comfortable margin.  We had our pixel processing set at 4X AA levels but if you backed things down to 2X perhaps, you'd likely see playable frame rates even at 1080p resolution.


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