Asus Zenbook UX21 Ultrabook, The New Thin

Gaming situations aren't going to be a strong suit for the Asus UX21E Zenbook, but that didn't stop us from running a few base-level tests, just to see what the machine had under the hood and if there was any sort of capability for gaming at play here... pun intended we suppose.

Far Cry 2 and Left 4 Dead 2
DirectX 10 Gaming Performance


FarCry 2

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.

FarCry2 drops the UX21 right about in where we expected it.  The higher overall clock speeds of the Core i5-2520M and Core i7-2820QM power it past the other systems with integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics cores.  The Zenbook does manage to edge out the ThinkPad Edge, but either way, frame rates at these settings aren't playable.  You'd have to drop down image quality a bit or resolution, to get acceptable performance.

{Left 4 Dead 2
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Left 4 Dead 2, though it has reasonably good visuals, is a bit easier on the graphics subsystem.  This was a game engine that the Asus UX21 Zenbook could handle a bit better.



Here we see playable frame rates, at reasonably good image quality settings, right on up through native resolution of the Zenbook UX21's 11.6-inch screen. 


David Altavilla

David Altavilla

Dave Altavilla is the founder, Editor In Chief and Publisher of HotHardware.com. With decades of experience as a semiconductor sales engineer, Dave Altavilla founded HotHardware.com over 25 years ago. Dave is also a published contributor to various technology-based publications and is a featured Tech Analyst expert on various network media shows. 

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