Dell XPS M1710 Version 2.0

Performance Comparisons with Quake 4 Details: http://www.quake4game.com/

Quake 4

id Software, in conjunction with developer Raven, recently released the latest addition to the wildly popular Quake franchise, Quake 4. Quake 4 is based upon an updated and slightly modified version of the Doom 3 engine, and as such performance characteristics between the two titles are very similar.  Like Doom 3, Quake 4 is also an OpenGL game that uses extremely high-detailed textures and a ton of dynamic lighting and shadows, but unlike Doom3, Quake 4 features some outdoor environments as well. We ran this these Quake 4 benchmarks using a custom demo with the game set to its "High-Quality" mode, at a resolution of 1024x768 without anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering enabled and the aspect ratio set to "Widescreen".

Unlike the previous scenario where no enhanced image quality settings were enabled, there is no large performance delta between the new XPS M1710 and the previous model. Rather, once 4xAA and 8xAF are introduced there is less than a 3fps difference between the two systems. With a mere 75MHz advantage in terms of GPU core frequency, this hardly comes as a surprise. Regardless, both the GeForce Go 7900 GTX and GeForce Go 7950 GTX have a sizeable advantage over the Alienware system equipped with two GeForce Go 7900 GS GPU's running in SLI mode.

Once the resolution is increased up to 1920x1200, we still see the same performance rankings we saw earlier. Here, the latest XPS M1710 barely edges out the previous iteration with the Alienware SLI notebook trailing in a somewhat distant third position. As the image quality settings increase, the performance delta between the XPS and Alienware notebooks begins to drastically decrease.

Once we introduce 4xAA and 8xAF when running at 1920x1200, there are less than 4fps separating the three notebooks. Regardless, the overall ranking remains unchanged with the latest XPS M1710 taking top honors followed by the previous version and then by the Alienware SLI system. It should be noted that all three systems were running with an average framerate above 40fps making for solid gameplay. As we suspected, this ranking changed once 8xAA and 8xAF were enabled as the power of the dual GPU Alienware system finally overpowered the single GPU systems from Dell. Even here, no notebook was able to break 20fps making the game anything but fluid and playable at these settings.