NVIDIA GeForce Go 6800 Ultra: Gaming On Dell's Inspiron XPS Gen 2

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: The Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 notebook we used for testing had a Windows XP Professional w/ SP2 pre-installed.  To get it ready for our benchmarks, the first thing we did was disabled auto-updating, drive indexing, and system restore, and then we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drive, and ran the tests...

The HotHardware Test System Intel-Powered Screamer

Benchmarks with Halo v1.06 Halo - All Patched & Ready To Go!

Halo

For many gamers, the release of Halo marked the end of a very long wait.  To the chagrin of some PC gamers, Halo was originally released as an Xbox exclusive a few years back. But Microsoft eventually released it for the PC. No additional patches or tweaks are needed to benchmark with Halo, as Gearbox has included all of the necessary information in its README file. The Halo benchmark runs through four of the cut-scenes from the game, after which the average frame rate is recorded. We patched the game using the latest v1.06 patch and ran this benchmark twice, once at 1,024 x 768 and then again at 1,600x1,200. Antialiasing doesn't work properly with Halo, so the tests below were run with antialiasing disabled.

Note: Unfortunately, we did not have access to a similarly configured laptop with graphics powered by a competing GPU, and configuring a similar desktop system also was not possible, so the GeForce Go 6800 Ultra's benchmark scores will have to stand on their own for now.  When additional Mobile i915 Express (Alviso) based notebooks arrive in the lab, using the same CPU but a different GPU, we'll post its benchmark scores ASAP to give you all a frame of reference.

As you can see, the GeForce Go 6800 Ultra had no problem handling Halo at either resolution.  At 1024x768, the GeForce Go 6800 Ultra posted one of the highest framerates we have seen in this game, probably due to a combination of the Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2's fast CPU, and the new 75 series drivers.  And at 1600x1200, the GeForce Go 6800 Ultra also performed very well, maintaining a very playable 60+ FPS framerate.

Performance Comparisons with 3DMark05 Futuremark's Latest

3DMark05

3DMark05 is the latest installment in a long line of synthetic 3D graphics benchmarks, dating back to late 1998.  3DMark99 came out in October of 1998 and was followed by the very popular DirectX 7 benchmark, 3DMark2000, roughly two years later.  The DirectX 8.1-compliant 3DMark2001 was released shortly thereafter, and it too was a very popular tool used by many hardcore gamers.  3DMark03, however, wasn't quite as well received thanks in no small part to the disapproval of graphics giant NVIDIA.  With 3DMark05, though, Futuremark hopes to win back some of its audience with a very advanced DirectX 9 benchmarking tool.  We ran 3DMark05's default test (1,024 x 768) in a couple of different configurations on the GeForce Go 6800 Ultra we tested and have the overall results for you posted below...

The latest version of 3DMark didn't pose much of a problem for the GeForce Go 6800 Ultra either.  In the default test, the GeForce Go 6800 Ultra easily broke the 5K mark, which puts it in the same league as NVIDIA's high-end desktop GPUs.  With anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled, the GeForce Go 6800 Ultra posted an impressive 3905.  Once again though, we should point out that the combination of a top-of-the-line Pentium M processors, a new driver revision, and the high core and memory clock speeds of the GeForce Go 6800 Ultra contribute to this platform's excellent performance.