Alienware X51 R2 Small Form Factor Game PC, Haswell-Infused

With the simulations out of the way, we dug into the games themselves. Many games have built-in benchmark utilities. We kicked off the game benchmarks with a pair of sequels: Far Cry 2 and Lost Planet 2.

Far Cry 2 DX10 Gaming Performance

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.


What's of main interest here is how the system performs at 1920x1080. Even with the visual quality settings maxed out, any modern gaming machine shouldn't break a sweat running Far Cry at Full HD, and in this case, the X51 R2 posted 127.51 fps, second only to the Titan-based system. It's also interesting that it's almost three times as fast as the original X51 that we reviewed last year.

Lost Planet 2 DX11 Gaming Performance

A follow-up to Capcom’s Lost Planet : Extreme Condition, Lost Planet 2 is a third person shooter that takes place again on E.D.N. III ten years after the story line of the first title. We ran the game’s DX11 mode which makes heavy use of DX11 Tessellation and Displacement mapping and soft shadows. There are also areas of the game that make use of DX11 DirectCompute for things like wave simulation in areas with water. This is one game engine that looks significantly different in DX11 mode when you compare certain environmental elements and character rendering in its DX9 mode versus DX11. We used the Test B option built into the benchmark tool and with all graphics options set to their High Quality values.