Alienware M18x Gaming Notebook: Tale of Two GPUs
Game Tests: Lost Planet 2, Just Cause 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. |
The Lost Planet 2 DX11 mode benchmark is a extremely demanding test, as you can see, and all of the single-GPU setups struggle to get to playable framerates, though NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580M has an easier time with it. This game engine and title has generally tended to favor NVIDIA's architecture over the months that we've been testing with it. This is partly due to the benchmark's heavy use of tesselation and NVIDIA's more robust geometry engines. Overall the NVIDIA-based Alienware M18x has approximately a 20 - 30% performance lead over the AMD-based machine, depending on configuration and resolution.
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Just Cause 2 was released in March 2010, from developers Avalanche Studios and Eidos Interactive. The game makes use of the Avalanche Engine 2.0, an updated version of the similarly named original. It is set on the fictional island of Panau in southeast Asia, and you play the role of Rico Rodriquez. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article using one of the built-in demo runs called Desert Sunrise. The test results shown here were run at various resolutions and settings. This game also supports a few CUDA-enabled features, but they were left disabled to keep the playing field level. |
Just Cause 2 stacks things up tighter, especially when you look at the multi-GPU scores, with the advantage yet again going to NVIDIA.
