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- Date:
- Saturday , June 26, 2004
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Dell Inspiron XPS Notebook
Gaming on a notebook is not what it used to be, and thank goodness for that! Dell's Inspiron XPS, sporting the ATI Radeon Mobility 9700, is one of the first true desktop replacements in our experience that puts gaming on a pedestal.
Dell XPS Gaming
This is truly where the rubber meets the road for many of us. One of the primary reasons that notebooks are not seen at LAN parties very often is because of lack of powerful graphics solutions. In the past, they simply have not had the video acceleration horsepower that they needed to really impress most gamers. That and upgradeability of course, but we will get to that below.
The XPS notebook comes equipped with one of the strongest 3D video accelerators sold, the ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 backed with 128MB of RAM.
Pixel and Vertex Shaders
Quad rendering & dual vertex engines
Full precision floating point with full performance
0.13 micron VPU featuring Low-K process technology
Fastest 3D engine speed
Low power operation
Support for AGP 8X
This is certainly not your mother's video card. The Mobility 9700 comes ready to deliver some of the latest gaming titles at very playable framerates while not being stingy with the eye candy.
Unreal Tournament 2004
How we tested: UT2K4 with "Maximum" in-game settings performed best at 1280x800. This way we kept good screen proportions in relation to the widescreen LCD. We played through many different maps and game types, both multiplayer and instant action, and found these settings to be the most suitable for this game. Note that we are using a new recorded online deathmatch demo for the data. This one is in the Onslaught - Crossfire level.
As you can obviously see from the graphing, our XPS notebook played UT2K4 quite fine at 1280x800 with the eye candy set to high. We think that frame rates as high as these should satisfy all but the hardcore tournament twitch gamer. Certainly if frame rate is your goal instead of IQ, a bump down to 1024 resolution would certainly speed things along even further.
Always keep in mind that the screen shots you are seeing here are compressed JPEG files, so they are certainly not as clear as you would see them with your own eyes. That said, the screen shots we captured are quite stunning for any PC.
You might also notice that we are running this game without Antialiasing enabled. We found that on a screen of this size with such high resolution, AA was more of a performance hog than it was worth.