Next we fired up some high-end game engines to allow the Alienware M14x to stretch its legs a bit doing what it was built for, gaming on the go.
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| Metro 2033 |
| DirectX 10 Gaming Performance |
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Metro 2033
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Metro 2033 is your basic 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, but rather you’re left to deal with life, or lack there-of more akin to the real world with blood spatter on your visor and your heart rate and respiration level as indicators. The game is loosely based on a novel by Russian Author Dmitry Glukhovsky. Metro 2003 boasts some of the best 3D visuals on the PC platform currently including a DX11 rendering mode that makes use of advanced depth of field effects and character model tessellation for increased realism. We tested the game engine using the Metro 2033 benchmark tool.
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Metro 2033, even in DX10 mode, is a bone-crushing gaming benchmark, with its heavy use of physics and particle effects, as well as complex shaders and modeling. If you've ever seen the game in action, the visuals are impressive. Here, though it was just able to break through the playable 30fps mark, the M14x beats out these mainstream systems with its more gamer-target graphics engine.
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Far Cry 2
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DirectX 10 Gaming Performance
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FarCry 2
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Like the original, FarCry 2 is one of the more visually impressive games to be released on the PC to date. Courtesy of the Dunia game engine developed by Ubisoft, FarCry 2's game-play is enhanced by advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, high resolution textures, complex shaders, realistic dynamic lighting, and motion-captured animations. We benchmarked the test systems in this article with the FarCry 2 benchmark tool using one of the built-in demo runs recorded in the "Ranch" map.
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Far Cry 2 is an older, far less demanding title and the framerates scale accordingly. Here we see the spread between discrete and integrated graphics is maintained, with an over 2X performance delta, and the M14x breaks out a bit further from the pack, again due to its more powerful GPU.
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Lost Planet 2
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DirectX 11 Gaming Performance
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Lost Planet 2
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Lost Planet 2 is a third person shooter developed by Capcom. It is the sequel to Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, and takes place ten years after the events of the first game. The plot begins with Mercenaries fighting against Jungle Pirates, while featuring major boss battles, extreme terrain, and the ability to pilot mechanized armor suits. We tested the game engine using the stand alone benchmark tool.
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In our Lost Planet 2 - DX11 test, which is also designed to break graphics engines into a hard sweat, we're showing you a different test group of machines, again with more robust GPUs under their hoods. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 and 470M series might be previous gen GPUs from NVIDIA but they're also a step up in terms of available graphics processing engines on board. Here the M14x trails by about 33% or so but it's also a different class of machine versus these full-up desktop replacement models we're showing here. None of the notebooks in this test are showing playable framerates per se, but this heavy-duty DX11 stress test shows the M14x does have some level of muscle for high-end gaming requirements. You'll just have to dial back the post processing and details in certain game engines.
