The gaming benchmarks continue with Lost Planet 2, Aliens vs. Predator, and Batman: Arkham City.
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| Lost Planet 2 |
| DX11 Gaming Performance |
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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.
Once again, last year’s Alienware M18x R2 gives the Alienware 18 a run for its money, but the latter does have a performance edge in this test.
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| Aliens vs. Predator |
| DX11 Gaming Performance |
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The Alien vs. Predator benchmark makes use of the advanced Tessellation, screen space ambient occlusion and high-quality shadow features, available with DirectX 11. In addition to enabling all of the aforementioned DirectX 11 related features offered by this benchmark, we also switched on 4X anti-aliasing along with 16X anisotropic filtering to more heavily tax the graphics cards being tested.
Clearly, Aliens vs Predator is not a problem for this machine; it the score of 85.3 FPS at its native resolution is proof that the Alienware 18 is a gamer to be reckoned with.
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| Batman: Arkham City |
| DirectX Gaming Performance |
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Batman: Arkham City is a sequel to 2009’s Game of the Year winning Batman: Arkham Asylum. This recently released sequel, however, lives up to and even surpasses the original. The story takes place 18 months after the original game. Quincy Sharp, the onetime administrator of Arkham Asylum, has become mayor and convinced Gotham to create "Arkham City" by walling off the worst, most crime-ridden areas of the city and turning the area into a giant open-air prison. The game has DirectX 9 and 11 rendering paths, with support for tessellation, multi-view soft shadows, and ambient occlusion. We tested in DX11 mode with all in-game graphical options set to their maximum values, at various resolutions.
The same can be said of the Batman: Arkham City test, as the Alienware 18 ran this game’s benchmark with ease, producing playable framerates at every resolution, with high image quality settings and anti-aliasing enabled.
