Dell XPS 14z Notebook Review
Gaming Benchmarks and Battery Life
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Metro 2033 is your basic post-apocalyptic first person shooter game with a few rather unconventional twists. Unlike most FPS titles, there is no health meter to measure your level of ailment, but rather you’re left to deal with life, or lack there-of more akin to the real world with blood spatter on your visor and your heart rate and respiration level as indicators. The game is loosely based on a novel by Russian Author Dmitry Glukhovsky. Metro 2003 boasts some of the best 3D visuals on the PC platform currently including a DX11 rendering mode that makes use of advanced depth of field effects and character model tessellation for increased realism. We tested the game engine using the Metro 2033 benchmark tool. |
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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. |
Unlike Metro 2033, the somewhat dated Far Cry 2 benchmark isn't as hard on systems, and we were able to squeeze out a few more frames-per-second here. Things were plenty playable at even higher resolutions. In other words, Far Cry 2 is about as new a game as the XPS 14z can handle at high-res.
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BatteryEater Pro tends to measure worst case scenarios, in that it doesn't really take into consideration power saving features, instead loading up the system until it dies out. It runs a spinning graphic constantly until the battery dies. We keep our test machines with Wi-Fi on, and screen brightness hovering at 50% for the life of the test.
