Asus 13.3" U30Jc Laptop, Optimus-Enabled Mobility

by Ray Willington — Monday, April 05, 2010, 09:00 AM EDT

Page 8:
Gaming Benchmarks

Performance with Half-Life 2 Episode 2 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Gaming Performance

To touch on gaming performance, we chose two games that draw moderately on system resources, Half-Life 2 Episode 2 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. We then ran a pre-recorded demo of each at a resolution of 1280x800 or 1366x768 (on our newer machines). The resulting performance achieved is indicated in frames per second in the graph below, and for comparison with machines that are able to play at higher resolutions with larger screens, we'll provide you with a link to our chart from the Asus G51J review.

We really like NVIDIA's Optimus technology. There's no two ways about it. It switches seamlessly between the integrated Intel GPU and the discrete GT 310M, and the latter performs great in gaming titles. We saw FPS spikes in HL2 of well over 70FPS at the machine's native resolution, and at no point in time did either title lag at all. Gameplay was perfectly smooth throughout, so even thought this machine promises portability, it's also plenty capable of handling modern day first-person shooters.