Ultrabooks aren't designed for heavy gaming. Even so, it's good to know what to expect from any system you're thinking about buying. Although they may not be designed with gaming in mind, ultrabooks can (and will) be used for light-duty gaming. To help you get a feel for the type of gaming performance you can expect from the Dell Latitude 6430u, we loaded a few gaming-related benchmarks to see just what it can do.
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| Futuremark 3DMark11 |
| Simulated Application Performance |
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Futuremark’s gaming 3DMark 11 benchmark is a grueling test that makes use of DirectX 11 and several highly-detailed demos to put a system's graphics card through its paces. We opt for the Performance setting in the benchmark when we test notebooks and ultrabooks, so keep that in mind if you compare the scores to a system that ran the Entry or Extreme version.
The scores in 3DMark 11 played out as you’d expect; The ASUS Zenbook’s impressive Core i7 (Ivy Bridge) chip and NVIDIA GT 620M graphics whipped the field, and the Dell XPS 15z wasn’t far behind with its NVIDIA GT 525M graphics Core i7 (Sandy Bridge) processor. The only other system that beat our Latitude 6430u was another Dell that was packing a Core i7 chip and Intel HD 4000 graphics.
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| Far Cry 2 Gaming Test |
| DirectX Gaming Performance |
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To get another perspective on the 6430u's gaming capabilities, we fired up the "Ranch" demo in Far Cry 2. This FPS game features lush vegetation and plenty of explosions and graphical mayhem. For this test, we turned off AA and used a resolution of 1280x720.
Very few of these systems offer anything approaching playable framerates in Far Cry 2, and unfortunately the Dell Latitude 6430u falls into that category with a score of just 20.6 FPS. Granted, that’s better than all but two of the systems in our test bank, but those two systems both offer playable framerates, which is not an arbitrary distinction.
