Dell Studio XPS 16 Review
Gaming Performance
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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 and also at a lower resolution of 800x600. The resulting performance achieved is indicated in frames per second in the graph below, and we tossed in benchmarks from Lenovo's Y530 -- which includes a 256MB GeForce 9300M GS -- along with Dell's Hybrid SLI-equipped Studio XPS 13 for reference. On the XPS 13, all gaming benchmarks were done while in Performance Mode, which enables the Hybrid SLI system.
Before running the benchmarks we played the games at both resolutions to get a feel for the machine's performance. At 1280x800, the Studio XPS 13 couldn't quite keep up with the titles. We'd consider them "playable," but not enjoyably so. However, on the Studio XPS 16, both games were perfectly playable at all resolutions.
Although we didn't put the data in the graph, we also tested the Studio XPS 16 at it's native resolution. And even at Full HD (1920x1080), both titles hummed along at frame rates well above 30FPS, meaning that playback was smooth for the most part and definitely playable. Dell did well by including the 1GB Radeon HD 4670 GPU. Playing games at Full HD on a notebook that's also relatively portable and offers decent battery life is a nice perk, and while we highly doubt this machine would have a similarly easy time with Crysis, there's no denying that it'd have plenty of power to plow through at lower resolutions, which you can't say for most IGPs.
