Alienware 17: AMD's R9 M290X Goes Mobile
Metro Last Light, BioShock Infinite, and Hitman: Absolution
Note: In order to synchronize our testing, we had to take a slight shift on resolutions. The desktop cards are tested in 1920x1200 instead of 1920x1080, but the performance difference between those settings is typically tiny -- on the order of 2-3%.
Metro Last Light is your typical post-apocalyptic first person shooter game with a few rather unconventional twists. Unlike most FPS titles, there is no health meter to measure your level of ailment; rather, you’re left to deal with life, or lack thereof, more akin to the real world with blood spatter on your visor and your heart rate and respiration level as indicators. Metro Last Light boasts some of the best 3D visuals on the PC platform and includes a DX11 rendering mode that makes use of advanced depth of field effects and character model tessellation for increased realism. This title also supports NVIDIA PhysX technology for impressive in-game physics effects. We tested the game at resolutions of 1920x1080 with its in-game image quality options set to their High Quality mode, with DOF effects disabled.
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Metro Last Light
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Bioshock Infinite
Again, the M290X keeps pace with the GTX 750 Ti (Nvidia cards have historically held an advantage in BioShock Infinite. The R9 270X is faster than the le AMD card by about 15% in this test.
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Hitman: Absolution
Hitman: Absolution follows Agent 47, a cold-blooded assassin, who takes on his most dangerous contract to date. Betrayed by those he once trusted - and now hunted by the police - he suddenly finds himself at the center of a dark conspiracy and must embark on a personal journey through a corrupt and twisted world. We tested the game at 1920x1080 with all in-game options set to their maximum values and global illumination and 4X anti-aliasing enabled.
Hitman: Absolution shows the Alienware 17 landing midway between the GTX 750 Ti and the Radeon R9 270X on the desktop. Again, we see a fairly sharp difference between the desktop and laptop chips -- Alienware actually does a good job of keeping the laptop cool, but it's hard to cool a desktop card in a mobile form factor.
