MSI GE62VR 6RF Apache Pro Review: A Pascal-Powered Gaming Laptop

Next we'll dig into some legacy game benchmark numbers but then ramp things up to much more current DX11 and DX12 game engines. However, since we don't have a full suite of gaming laptop reference numbers on some of the newer titles, we'll show just the Apache Pro on its own over various resolutions in a couple of the following tests.

Bioshock Infinite Game Benchmark DirectX 11 Gaming Performance

Based on Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, BioShock Infinite takes you (as former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt) to the mysterious, flying city of Columbia. You find yourself helping Elizabeth, who soon turns out to have unusual powers. The game offers a first person shooter (FPS) style view but the storyline is as compelling as the battles and Bioshock infinite has won awards and praise for its story and art design.


Folks, this is impressive. Bear in mind that the GeForce GTX 1060 is three rungs down on Pascal's GeForce 10 Series ladder, or four rungs if you count the Titan X. Yet here it is outpacing not only previous generation laptops powered by the GeForce GTX 970M, but also manages to stiff arm the GTX 980M. That used to be the top dog in mobile for NVIDIA, but now it's suddenly looking a little lethargic by comparison.

Middle Earth: Shadow Of Mordor Performance Glorious Orc-Slaying Vengeance

Monolith’s surprisingly fun Orc-slaying title Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, delivers a ton of visual fidelity even at the lowest quality settings. So, to maximize the eye-candy on this high-end laptop, we ran the game’s High quality benchmark routine at a couple of resolutions, topping out at the native resolution the Osiris' panel. 

All of the game's graphics-related options were enabled, along with FXAA and Camera Blur...


The Apache Pro broke 100 frames per second by averaging 110.83 FPS at its native resolution (1920x1080) in Middle Earth, which shows the kind of headroom you have to play with. It should be a long time before the Apache Pro needs to have game settings dialed down, and even longer before needing to scale back the display resolution. Still, we included benchmarks of the system running at 1600x900 and 1280x720 here to see how it compares to laptops based on Maxwell. As you can see, it's no contest.

Rise Of The Tomb Raider DirectX 12 Performance

Rise of the Tomb Raider has hit the PC lining it up in our gun sights for graphics, gameplay and performance analysis. The game launched on the Xbox family of consoles a few months back and has since been ported to PC thanks to NIXXES Software. It’s a competent console to PC port updated with many graphics settings and effects to tweak and dial to your particular tastes and system capabilities. Some of the rendering and effects features include, Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field, Dynamic Foliage, Bloom shader effects, Tessellation and several more. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let's give you some backdrop on the Tomb Raider series.

We also ran the game's benchmark running in its DX12 code path mode.



A similar story played out in Rise of the Tomb Raider where the Apache Pro once again managed to keep a great deal of distance between it and previous generation laptops based on Maxwell. No two ways about it, this is an impressive showing for Pascal in a mobile system.