Dell 6-Core Studio XPS 7100 Review

Name: Dell Studio XPS 7100
Brand: Dell

by Paul Lilly — Monday, July 05, 2010, 10:30 AM EDT

Far Cry 2 & Street Figher 4

Page 6: Far Cry 2 & Street Figher 4

FarCry 2

DX10 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 graphics cards in this article with a fully patched version of FarCry 2, using one of the built-in demo runs recorded in the Ranch Map. The test results shown here were run at various resolutions and settings.

2560x1600 4XAA: 46.90

Dell's Studio proved adept at slicing through Far Cry 2 with playable framerates with minimal concessions. If you own a 30-inch monitor with a 2560x1600 screen resolution, you'll probably want to dial down the AA to 4X, but otherwise the game ran fine on Ultra High quality settings. And at 1900x1200, anything is fair game. The Studio kept pace with CyberPower's Gamer Extreme 3000 rig we reviewed last year, which came equipped with a dual-GPU GTX 295 and Core i7 860 processor. Credit the HD 5870 and six-core Phenom II X6 combo for giving the Studio plenty of gaming punch.

Street Fighter IV

DX10 Gaming Performance

Street Fighter IV

Released for the PC platform in July 2009, Street Fighter IV builds on the popular gaming series with new visuals and locales. The freely available benchmark tool stresses the GPU more than anything else and includes flexible settings for ultra high resolutions with multisampling AA and three Shader effects. Cel-shading, multiplex hemisphere lighting, soft shadows, HDR, motion blur, and other visual effects are all represented here.

While not particularly demanding, the Street Fighter IV benchmark does give a good idea at how a graphics card or, in this case, a full system scales at higher resolutions. Dell's Studio cruised through this one without breaking a sweat, once again thanks in large part to the HD 5870 videocard.