Next we'll dig into some legacy game benchmark numbers, but then ramp things up to much more current DX11 and DX12 game engines. However, since we don't have a full suite of gaming laptop reference numbers on some of the newer titles like Gears of War 4, we'll show just the Alienware 13 R3 on its own over various resolutions.
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Bioshock Infinite Game Benchmark
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DirectX 11 Gaming Performance
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Based on Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, BioShock Infinite takes you (as former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt) to the mysterious, flying city of Columbia. You find yourself helping Elizabeth, who soon turns out to have unusual powers. The game offers a first person shooter (FPS) style view but the storyline is as compelling as the battles and Bioshock infinite has won awards and praise for its story and art design.
The Alienware 13 R3 sneezes at a legacy title like Bioshock Infinite, offering over 100 FPS (and again edging out the MSI Apache Pro) at a 1080p resolution with Ultra image quality settings.
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Middle Earth: Shadow Of Mordor Performance
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Glorious Orc-Slaying Vengeance
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Monolith’s surprisingly fun Orc-slaying title Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, delivers a ton of visual fidelity even at the lowest quality settings. So, to maximize the eye-candy on this high-end gaming laptop, we ran the game’s High quality benchmark routine at a couple of resolutions.
All of the game's graphics-related options were enabled, along with FXAA and Camera Blur...
The Alienware 13 R3 showed a little inconsistency here at the 1600X900 resolution, which may have been more due to the way Mordor scales over display panel and desktop resolution than anything else. This variability isn't uncommon, actually. Regardless, when you compare the previous generation Alienware 13 to the current gen with GeForce 10, you're looking at a 2X performance gain -- impressive to say the least. Incidentally, that Alienware 13 OLED display scales really well from its native QHD 2560X1440 resolution to FHD 1920X1080 resolution and maintains its crispness.
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Rise Of The Tomb Raider
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DirectX 12 Performance
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Rise of the Tomb Raider has hit the PC and landed in our gun sights for graphics, gameplay and performance analysis. The game launched on the Xbox family of consoles a few months back and has since been ported to PC thanks to NIXXES Software. It’s a competent console to PC port updated with many graphics settings and effects to tweak and dial to your particular tastes and system capabilities. Some of the rendering and effects features include, Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field, Dynamic Foliage, Bloom shader effects, Tessellation and several more.
We also ran the game's benchmark using its DX12 code path.
A similar scene is painted here for the Alienware 13 R3, though this time it slides in just on the heels of the MSI Apache Pro in a couple of the runs. Regardless, it's a neck-and-neck race and again we see almost 2X the performance of the previous generation 13-inch Alienware machine.
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Gears Of War 4 |
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DirectX 12 Gaming Gore |
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Gears of War 4 is a great looking game that makes impressive use of Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 and the rich visual effects and rendering the powerful game engine offers. Gloriously, those playing on the PC have over 30 graphics settings (#PCMasterRace) at their disposal for hands-on fine tuning, so that Gears 4 performs smoothly, despite possible hardware constraints. We tested the Alienware 13 R3 on its own over resolution, just to give you a feel for how this machine handles this hot new triple-A title.
Native 2560X1440 resolution at the High image quality preset, pulling 60 FPS in Gears of War 4, on a 13-inch notebook? Yes please, Alienware. Just because you can drop this machine easily into a backpack or travel bag doesn't mean you're compromising your game performance. Great stuff here.
