Alienware Alpha R2 Review: Big Screen Gaming In A Little Package
Alpha R2 Bioshock, Thief And Shadow Of Mordor Performance
BioShock Infinite was game-of-the-year material back in the day. The floating city of Columbia is one of the most evocative, intense, and gorgeous environments we've ever seen in a PC game -- but how much you like it may depend on what sort of visual wizardry you prefer. BioShock Infinite is built on Unreal Engine 3, and while it pushes that framework's capabilities into the stratosphere, there's a clear difference between BioShock Infinite and, say, Crysis 3. BioShock Infinite emphasizes light, color and motion, and while the characters look more exaggerated and cartoon-like than some other games, they still look great. We tested the game at various resolutions with its DX11 code path with DOF effects enabled.
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The Alpha R2 with its GeForce GTX 960 GPU destroyed all similar sized PCs using integrated graphics and averaged just over 107 frames per second. It's not surprising to see the Alpha R2 lead the pack from a distance, but it's impressive considering its tiny footprint. This type of performance isn't coming from a mid-tower or even a typical SFF system, but a little squared shaped box that's smaller than the ones your local pizza joint serves a personal pan pizza inside.
We also tested the Alpha R2 at different resolutions to see how it scales. And though it's only intended for 4K gaming with an Alienware Graphics Amplifier attached, we tried it anyway. At 4K, things were almost playable, but as you can see the framerate drops in certain scenes make it an exercise in futility, at least with the graphics set at High. Still, not bad for such a small system.
Finally, in the Ultra Quality preset test, you can see how the Alpha R2 hangs versus larger, more powerful mid tower and mini ITX systems. Here the machine puts up respectable numbers and caps 60 FPS at 1080p.
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![mordor](https://hothardware.com/ContentImages/Article/2349/content/mordor.jpg)
Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor
![Alienware Alpha R2 Shadow of Mordor](https://hothardware.com/ContentImages/Article/2504/content/Alienware_Alpha_R2_Middle_Earth_Compared.png)
![Alienware Alpha R2 Shadow of Mordor Resolutions](https://hothardware.com/ContentImages/Article/2504/content/Alienware_Alpha_R2_Middle_Earth.png)
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Thief
One final note on all of these tests above are that many of the benchmark scores were recorded at Medium and Normal image quality presets (to compare to the Skull Canyon NUC scores). If you dialed things up for the Alpha R2 to High quality settings, you'd lose some performance but gain fidelity, obviously. Regardless, the Alpha R2 is more than capable of full 1080p gaming at high image quality settings across virtually all current game titles. For a reference point, in Thief at 1920X1080 with the High image quality preset, the Alienware Alpha R2 scores 53.8 FPS.