Dell XPS 18 Portable All-in-One: Haswell Reloaded
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.
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The speedier chip and upgraded graphics resulted in a performance gain of a couple frames per second in Lost Planet 2, though at 1920x1080 and with 4xAA enabled, the game/benchmark is still too much for this level of integrated graphics.
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The Aliens vs Predator benchmark makes use of the advanced Tessellation, screen space ambient occlusion and high-quality shadow features, available with DirectX 11. We kept things low-key in this benchmark run, dialing down the settings to Low and comparing 4xAA to 0xAA.
We saw a similar roadblock in Aliens vs Predator -- even with no Anti-Aliasing enabled and all the other settings configured to Low, the Intel Graphics 4400 just isn't strong enough to yield playable framerates. However, we did see performance jump as we scaled back the resolution, and finally managed playable (barely) framerates when dropping down to 1024x768. That's not ideal, but doable on an 18.4-inch panel.
It should also be noted that these are more demanding benchmarks. For casual gamers who want to play older titles or less stress games like, say, Plants vs Zombies, the XPS 18 Portable can oblige.
It should also be noted that these are more demanding benchmarks. For casual gamers who want to play older titles or less stress games like, say, Plants vs Zombies, the XPS 18 Portable can oblige.
