Alienware 13 OLED Laptop Review: 13 Inches Of Gorgeous

Name: Alienware 13 OLED Laptop
Brand: Alienware

by Dave Altavilla — Friday, June 24, 2016, 12:00 PM EDT

Alienware 13 OLED Gaming: Bioshock, Mordor And Tomb Raider

Page 5: Alienware 13 OLED Gaming: Bioshock, Mordor And Tomb Raider

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, we'll show just the AW 13 on it's own over various resolutions, in a couple of the following tests.

Bioshock Infinite Game Benchmark

DirectX 11 Gaming Performance

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.

In this test we once again return to pitting the Alienware 13 OLED against significantly more powerful gaming notebooks. Though 1080p gaming at Ultra High image quality settings are still very playable for the Alienware 13 OLED, at 49 frames per second, it does fall into the middle of the pack in terms of overall performance, compared to these much higher end configs with GeForce GTX 980M and 970M GPUs under their hoods. This is to be expected and regardless, the AW 13 puts up a good fight.

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor Performance

Glorious Orc-Slaying Vengeance

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 laptop, we ran the game’s Ultra quality benchmark routine at a couple of resolutions, topping out at the native resolution of its gorgeous OLED panel (2560X1440).

All of the game's graphics-related options were enabled, along with FXAA and Camera Blur...

All of the game's graphics-related options were enabled, along with FXAA and Camera Blur...

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Here's where things get interesting. At 1080p, even on the High image quality preset, Mordor is plenty playable on the Alienware 13 OLED, north of 50 FPS. At its native res, however, depending on your personal view, we're getting closer to unplayable territory at 34 frames per second. The good news is, and we've yet to note this until now, scaling on the AW 13's OLED panel is also excellent as well. So you won't miss gaming at 1440p native resolution very much in this case, if at all, actually. Everything still looked great to us at 1080p.

Rise of The Tomb Raider

DirectX 12 Performance

Rise of the Tomb Raider has hit the PC lining it up 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. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let's give you some backdrop on the Tomb Raider series.

We also ran the game's benchmark running in its DX12 code path mode, which proved to be slightly faster than DX11 settings (by a frame or two).

Here again the Alienware 13 OLED maintains a fluid frame rate right up through 1080p but begins to find its limited at 1440p. Regardless, again, at the game's High image quality preset and with the very capable scaling of Alienware's OLED panel (and NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 965M), the visuals are still pretty fantastic, and crispy too, with the AW 13 OLED's 1ms pixel response time.