Hitman: Absolution, Dirt, and Batman: Arkham City
Hitman:
Absolution
Hitman: Absolution is the contrary of
Sniper Elite V2 when it comes to the use of resources. In the game's preset
test, thousands of NPCs are animated throughout the scene. The resources needed
to animate these non-player cartoon characters means that the GPU may have to
wait for CPU to complete.
Hitman:
Absolution
In the Ultra quality test, we found that
the APU of GX60 was obviously holding the machine. However, the speed of 21fps
is still playable, and the game itself is never as demanding as this test. In
normal playing mode, you can easily run Hitman: Absolution at the maximum
settings on the GX60 is much less of an issue. Yet you can see that the frame
rates double on the system based on the GTX 680M, with its Core i7-3940M for
$1,100.
Knocking the quality down to a notch does
not help the GX60; the bottleneck is still thousands of NPCs that are moving
across the display.
At Medium quality, there is a slight
increase in performance, but the GX60 that is limited to the CPU falls behind
the two Intel-based machines.
DiRT:
Showdown
DiRT:
Showdown
The preset test of DiRT: Showdown is tough
on both the CPU and GPU.
With everything set up at the maximum
level, the GX60’s Radeon 7970M reaches a very stable 40fps speed. In
comparison, the GeForce GTX 680M also reaches about 40fps at 1,920 x 1,080.
However, at the lower resolutions, it speeds up. The GX60 does not, showing a
processor bottleneck.
Taking the settings down to High quality,
we found excellent ratio adjustment from the two Nvidia-based machines as the
load on the GPU drops down. The GX60 has an extra 5fps on average; once again
this shows that a processor bottleneck prevents the GX60 from running faster.
At the Medium quality setting, all three
systems display symptoms of a processor bottleneck.
Batman:
Arkham City
Batman:
Arkham City
At Ultra quality settings, the GeForce GTX
680M delivers about 10% more performance than the Radeon HD 7970M. However,
both the high-end cards pass through the testing. While the GTX 660m of Blade
also provides a 25fps speed that is nearly playable.
At High quality, there is a small increase
in performance. The two Nvidia / Intel computers seem to have a more
significant increase at the resolution of 1,366 x 768 compared with the GX60.
Only the slower GTX 660M has the
actual speed increase after falling down the Medium quality setting.
World
of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria
World
of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria
Word of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria
provides an expansion with greatly detailed new worlds. One of the most
demanding parts of the game is in Honeydew Villiage. Placing a character
directly between the guards of the entrance to the city while it is raining in
the game, then panning the camera right above the grassy hill next to them
brings plenty of moving objects into the vision. It is one of the worst
scenarios that we have seen in the game.
There are tons of moving components in our
test sequence. The Radeon HD 7970M reaches triple-digit frame rates in most of
the time, but in this field, performance drops to 40fps that is quite
remarkable. For the two Core i7-based machines are still changing the ratio based
on resolution, the MSI GX60 is clearly limited to the processor.
Knocking the preset down to High is to
offer an increase in frame rates; despite with the rate of 40fps at Ultra, this
decline is not necessary on the GX60.
A serious CPU bottleneck helps the Blade’s
GeForce GTX 660m pull ahead the Radeon HD 7970M. But again, as we saw 40fps
using the Ultra setting, there is really no reason to go back to a lower
quality setting.
The
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
The
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
The test setups for the Elder Scrolls V:
Skyrim is similar to those in the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: PC Performance,
Benchmarked.
With nearly 40fps, the GX60 does not have
any problems when playing Skyrim with max settings. Of course, it is easy to
see that the APU in MSI's laptop is holding the system back from better
performance.
While knocking down to the High quality
setting alleviates the load enough to have an average speed that is higher than
10fps, there is really no need to do that in Skyrim. It is sufficient to play
at the Ultra settings.
The same observation remains true for the
Medium quality settings. Yes, it facilitates better performance, but we prefer
to get the nicer-looking graphics.
Total
War: Shogun 2
Total
War: Shogun 2
The Radeon HD 7970M pulls slightly ahead
the GeForce GTX 680M at 48fps. Obviously, you are able to play Shogun 2 with
everything set at the maximum level on the GX60.
Switching off anti-aliasing feature doubles
the frame rates on the Nvidia cards.
Running the preset 720p test brings under
70fps speed on the GX60.
