Dell's XPS 15z Ultra Slim Notebook Review

Gaming Benchmarks

Metro 2033
DirecX11 Gaming Performance


Metro 2033

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.

Let's not beat around the bush: Metro 2033 is an intense game. And we aren't just talking about gameplay. It's a title that seriously taxes a machine, and it requires serious hardware to run this title well. The CPU on the XPS 15z was plenty ready for the task, but the middling GT 525M isn't exactly a top-tier notebook GPU. This is one of the corners Dell cut to keep heat down and price down, and it shows in the benchmarks. For what it's worth, Metro was plenty playable at 1024x768 with the details cranked down, but this machine doesn't measure up to some of the dedicated gaming rigs we've seen.

 

FarCry 2
DirectX 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.

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. Plenty playable at even higher resolutions. In other words, Far Cry 2 is about as new a game as the XPS 15z can handle at high-res; if your favorite title came out prior to the FC2, and has similar or lesser spec requirements, you should be golden.


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