Alienware M18x Gaming Notebook: Tale of Two GPUs

Name: Alienware M18x
Brand: Alienware

by Dave Altavilla — Tuesday, October 04, 2011, 11:00 AM EDT

Cinebench and 3DMark 11

Maxon's Cinebench R11.5 benchmark is based on the company's Cinema 4D software used for 3D content creation and tests both the CPU and GPU in separate benchmark runs. On the CPU side, Cinebench renders a photorealistic 3D scene by tapping into up to 64 processing threads (CPU) to process more than 300,000 total polygons, while the GPU benchmark measures graphics performance by manipulating nearly 1 million polygons and huge amounts of textures.

Cinebench R11.5 64-bit

3D Rendering Performance

We should note that, though Cinebench doesn't actually benefit from multi-GPU configurations currently, we did test the systems with the technology enabled. You can see the CPU scores are all pretty tight between the configurations but perhaps AMD has been a bit more diligent on tuning drivers for this application versus NVIDIA.

Futuremark 3DMark 11

Synthetic DX11 Gaming Performance

Futuremark 3DMark11

The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark11, is specifically bound to Windows Vista and 7-based systems because it uses the advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 11, which isn't available on previous versions of Windows. 3DMark11 isn't simply a port of 3DMark Vantage to DirectX 11, though. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated four new graphics tests, a physics tests, and a new combined test. We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark11's Extreme preset option, which uses a resolution of 1920x1080 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

M18x - AMD Radeon HD 6990M CrossFire

M18x - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M SLI

3DMark 11 is squarely targeted at gaming performance obviously and we felt it best to give you the direct results page data in each of the tests as well. As you can see it's a nip-and-tuck battle between the two M18x configurations, though versus the rest of the field it's a total blowout for the M18x. Note multi-GPU scores are nearly two times that of their single GPU scores with the M18x, though in this test, AMD's CrossFire setup seems to scale a bit better.