MSI Titan GT77 HX Laptop Review: Killer Gaming And Creator Performance
MSI Titan GT77 HX Gaming Laptop: System Benchmarks, Game Performance And Battery Life
The MSI Titan GT77 HX, however, adds an additional wrinkle. This machine gives users the option to configure the discrete GPU to operate in a hybrid mode (NVIDIA Optimus), which switches between the Core i9-13950HX's integrated Intel iGPU and the GeForce RTX 4090 dGPU depending on the workload, or in an always-on mode that keeps the GeForce powered up and directly connected to the display to provide the best performance. All of our benchmarks were run with the always-on discrete graphics mode enabled.
ATTO Disk Benchmark
The ATTO disk benchmark is a fairly quick and simple test which measures read/write bandwidth and IOPS across a range of different data sizes. While we don't typically compare these results across multiple machines, it's useful to gauge whether a particular notebook's storage subsystem is up to snuff.
The MSI Titan GT77 HX we tested came outfitted with a pair of 2TB Samsung NVMe PCIe Gen 4 SSDs configured in RAID 0. If you recall, RAID 0 stripes data across both drives in parallel, to effectively double throughput. The plus to a configuration like this is nearly 2x the sequential throughput of a single drive. The downside is that if one of the drives in the RAID fails, data on both drives is effectively lost. That said, performance is top notch here, as you can see. The MSI Titan GT77 HX broke 12GB/s for reads, with nearly 10GB/s writes.
Speedometer 2.0 Browser Benchmark
We use BrowserBench.org's Speedometer test to gauge our web experiences, which takes a holistic look at web application performance. This test automatically loads and runs several sample web apps from ToDoMVC.com using the most popular web development frameworks around, including React, Angular, Ember.js, and even vanilla JavaScript. This test is a better example of how systems cope with real web applications, as opposed to a pure JavaScript compute test like JetStream. All tests were performed using the latest version of Chrome.
Please keep in mind that browser updates can, and often do, result in increased performance in this benchmark. And, unfortunately, we don't have all of these notebooks in perpetuity to re-run these tests when necessary. Even still, we don't think it would have affected to standings much; the MSI Titan GT77 HX dropped into the pole position once again.
Cinebench R23 Rendering Benchmark
This is the latest 3D rendering benchmark from Maxon, based on the Cinema 4D R23 rendering engine. We tested both single-threaded and multi-threaded tests on all of the notebooks represented here...
We thought the Razer Blade 16 was fast when we tested it, but the MSI Titan GT77 HX jumps out to a lead in Cinebench by a clear margin. The fact is, the MSI Titan GT77 HX is simply a thicker, heavier machine with more thermal capacity. And the beefy cooler in the GT77 HX (relatively speaking) allows the CPU to boost to higher frequencies, for longer periods, which pushes its performance up a couple of notches.
Geekbench 5 Benchmarks
Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmark that simulates real world processing workloads in image processing and particle physics scenarios. We tested the notebooks featured here in Geekbench's single and multi-core workloads. It measures single-threaded performance allowing a single core to stretch its legs, and multi-threaded throughput to put all cores under a heavy load.
Our Geekbench results somewhat mirror Cinebench. Once again, we see the MSI Titan GT77 HX with its Core i9-13950HX leading the pack, in both the single and multi-threaded tests, nearly doubling the performance of the Ryzen 9 6900HS -- stay tuned for some benchmarks with Dragon Range, though...review coming very soon...
PCMark 10 Whole System Benchmarks
PCMark 10 uses a mix of real-world applications and simulated workloads to establish how well a given system performs productivity tasks, including image and video editing, web browsing, and OpenOffice document editing. While these scores appear to be all over the place, the systems are sorted by their overall PCMark score, which is the third (gray) bar in each cluster.
3DMark Graphics And GPU Tests
3DMark has several different graphics tests which focus on different types of systems. We start with Time Spy, which was 3DMark's headline benchmark until just recently. This test presents a pretty significant challenge for the system's CPU and GPU using DirectX 12's API...
Whoa. The MSI Titan GT77 HX clearly outran every other system we tested here, including the Razer Blade 16 which is powered by similar hardware. Keep in mind, these 3DMark tests are significantly influenced by CPU performance. And since the MSI Titan GT77 HX has a cooling solution capable of dissipating 250W (175W for the GPU and 75W for the CPU), both the GPU and CPU and can at full tilt without throttling for longer durations than slimmer / lighter notebooks with less capable cooling.
Next up, let's take a look at the Extreme preset for the punishing 3DMark Fire Strike test. This DirectX 11 test has been around for a while, but it's still pretty challenging for mobile GPUs.
We saw more of the same in Fire Strike Extreme, where the MSI Titan GT77 HX once again jumped out to a sizable lead over all of the other notebooks we tested.
Lastly, the Port Royal test uses DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR) along with traditional rasterization techniques to illuminate a scene...
DXR hardware is a requirement for this test, so we don't have quite as many machines represented, but the standings remain unchanged -- the MSI Titan GT77 HX with its Core i9-13950HX and GeForce RTX 4090 remain in the top spot by a wide margin.
Middle Earth: Shadow Of War Tests
Middle Earth: Shadow of War is a fun and beautiful title set in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings universe. To test the game's performance relative to other systems, we set the resolution to 1920x1080 (or 2560x1440) and turned the visuals up to the High preset. The frame rates here are the average reported by the built-in benchmark.
In the first of our actual game tests, we're going to show results at two resolutions, 1080p because that's where we've got the most reference data, and 1440p. In the 1440p tests, we only have results from the previous-gen Razer Blade 17 and the recently released Razer Blade 16, which isn't ideal, but still provides an adequate frame of reference. As you can see, the MSI Titan GT77 HX continues to perform very well and takes the lead here at both resolutions. We should also note that at its native 4K display resolution, the machine put up 135 FPS.
Shadow Of The Tomb Raider Benchmarks
The finale in the rebooted Tomb Raider trilogy, Shadow of the Tomb Raider is easily the best-looking of the bunch. It's also brimming with Tobii eye-tracking hardware support, and leading-edge graphics technologies. To test this game out, we again turned the visuals up to their highest preset and tested at the FullHD resolution of 1920x1080, and again at 2560x1440.
The Tomb Raider testing didn't reveal any surprises -- once again we see the MSI Titan GT77 HX taking the lead, crushing the previous-gen machine and slightly outpacing the similarly equipped Razer Blade 16. At 4K, the system put up a minimum framerate of 86 FPS, with a 149 FPS average.
F1 2021 Benchmarks
F1 2021 supports DirectX 12 with ray tracing, and it incorporates support for a number of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) and NVIDIA technologies (like DLSS). We tested the games with its Ultra High graphics preset, with ray-tracing and TAA enabled at a couple of resolutions to see what the Razer Blade 16 could do...
Marvel's Guardians Of The Galaxy
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is an action-adventure game where you play as Star-Lord and lead the rest of the Guardians from mission to mission. The game’s minimum requirements call for a Radeon RX 570 or GeForce GTX 1060-class GPU, but it also supports some of the latest graphics technologies, including DXR and DLSS.
F1 2022 DLSS @ 4K Testing
F1 2022 is Codemaster’s latest Formula One racing simulation, and like previous version of the game, it sports impressive visuals. Unlike the other games, we tested F1 2022 at 4K, natively, and again across all of the various DLSS modes available.
Battery Life And Power Tests
We run a custom 1080p HD video loop test developed in-house, to prove out battery life with our test group of machines. In all tests, Windows Quiet Hours / Focus Assist has been enabled and the displays are calibrated with lux meters on pure white screens to as close to 115 lux as possible. For the average laptop this is somewhere between a 40-60 percent brightness setting.
When running a simulated gaming workload where the MSI Titan GT77 HX's CPU, GPU, memory and storage are all getting taxed simultaneously, battery life is even shorter and actually trails the Razer Blade 16, even though the latter has a smaller battery. The MSI Titan GT77 HX went a little past an hour untethered while running a graphically intensive workload.
Please note, however, that these are worst case scenario numbers, measured with the notebooks in discrete graphics mode. In hybrid mode, which will use on-processor graphics, or when using using features like NVIDIA's Battery Boost, longer battery life is possible.
