Alienware Aurora ALX Gaming System Preview
Left 4 Dead, Far Cry 2, Crysis
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Left 4 Dead is a co-operative, survival horror, first-person shooter that was developed by Turtle Rock Studios, which was purchased by Valve part-way into development. Like Half Life 2, the game uses the Source engine, however, the visual in L4D are far superior to anything seen in the Half Life universe to date. The game pits four Survivors of an apocalyptic pandemic against hordes of aggressive zombies. We tested the game at resolutions of 1,280 x1024, 1680 x 1050 and 1920 x 1,200 with 8X anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled and all in game graphical options set to their maximum values. |
We hit monstrous frame rates in Left 4 Dead. Even with all image quality settings at max, the Aurora ALX averaged 189.3 fps at 1920x1200 resolution.
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Like the original, FarCry 2 is one of the more visually impressive games to be released on the PC to date. Courtesy of the Dunia game engine developed by Ubisoft, FarCry 2's game-play is enhanced by advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, high resolution textures, complex shaders, realistic dynamic lighting, and motion-captured animations. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article with a fully patched version of FarCry 2, using one of the built-in demo runs recorded in the "Ranch" map. The test results shown here were run at a resolution of 1920x1200 with 8X AA and Ultra High Quality presets enabled concurrently. |
Compared to the test systems in this group, we witnessed a massive performance improvement in Far Cry 2. The Aurora ALX featuring dual ATI 5870 graphics cards cut through this benchmark like a hot knife in butter.
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Crytek's game engine visuals in Crysis are some of the most impressive real-time 3D renderings we've seen to date on a computer screen. The engine employs some of the latest techniques in 3D rendering like Parallax Occlusion Mapping, Subsurface Scattering, Motion Blur, and Depth-of-Field effects, as well as an impressive use of Shader technology. The single player, FPS Crysis is a smash-hit, and rightfully so. We patched the game to v1.2 with all of the game's visual settings to 'High' at 1920x1200 resolution to put a significant load on the systems' graphics engines being tested. |
