Can Ultrapole run "Crysis Trilogy" at 60 fps? • iGamesNews.com

In terms of build quality, materials, workmanship, ergonomics and display quality, Dell's latest XPS 13 2-in-1 Convertible is one of the best laptops I've used. It's not just a laptop-the design allows the device to seamlessly transform into a giant touchscreen tablet, or it can be placed upside down for presentations or media viewing. In terms of performance, it is powered by Core i7 1065G7 (Intel's latest 10nm Ice Lake processor) and provides quad-core / eight-threaded CPU capabilities supported by Iris Plus graphics. This is the most powerful integrated graphics ever offered by Intel, and I intend to use it in stress tests that have been tested for a long time. Can I run Crysis? More specifically, can it run the entire Crysis Trilogy at 60 fps?

I also want to separate and separate the Ice Lake CPU architecture from the Iris Plus components. After all, this is the first truly new mainstream Intel processor architecture we have since the 6th generation Core (codenamed Skylake) came out in 2015. To this end, I plan to connect XPS to Thunderbolt 3 external GPU. But before we dive deeper into performance, Dell's precision engineering deserves attention.

Yes, it is a convertible with a slim profile, which is the perfect embodiment of XPS. The screen effectively has no bezels, which reduces the overall footprint, and is about half an inch thick. Less than three pounds or about 1.3 kilograms. There are two main trade-offs for this size. First, the port selection is poor. You will get two USB-C- either side. At least they all have Thunderbolt 3 support enabled, and they can both charge the device and / or run the display. There is also a microSD slot on the XPS, but the reality is that meaningful connections will require some described hubs.

Frankly, the XPS is very beautiful and comes with an excellent display as the backing. Full HD and 4K touchscreens are available, I chose the latter (yes, I ordered it myself and paid for this unit). The screen itself has a 16:10 aspect ratio, and I personally prefer productivity, web browsing and more standard widescreen displays. This means that the "4K" screen actually offers a resolution of 3840×2400 and also has HDR capabilities. Peak brightness apparently reaches 400 nits, which means that SDR may look a little dim if high dynamic range is enabled, but HDR content does have a convincing effect.

The XPS 2-in-1 7390 looks and feels like a home run, but my main concern is the performance of Ice Lake. The idea of ​​adopting this small quad-core Intel CPU is very compelling, and if you come up with a baseline to have some idea of ​​what this feature can do, the results will be very impressive. In Cinebench R15 single-threaded operation, the storage speed of the Core i7 1065G7 seems to be better than the Core i7 4790K. Although it has decreased in multi-threaded performance, its 86% performance level is excellent for lightweight Results notebook.

However, actually achieving this level of performance is not as simple as I thought. Out of the box, my Cinebench score was only 330, which only accounted for 46% of the 773 score of the full unlock, which impressed me. Full-core Turbo is limited to around 1.6GHz-this is a problem for me. I purchased the XPS to replace the 2015 Retina MacBook Pro, which received only a little touch in the Ice Lake test results, which meant that my "Apple to Apple" performance upgrade was initially far below my expectations. To unleash the full capabilities of Ice Lake, you need to access Dell's thermal management menu and change the default "optimization" setting to "ultra performance" that sounds good. The performance of the CPU has improved significantly, but as we will discover, this comes at a price.

But let's jump to the main event: Can it run Crysis? Intel's new Iris Plus integrated graphics combines 64 execution units with 3733MHz LPDDR4X memory, which means we can get a powerful iGPU solution from today's laptop technology and provide as much memory bandwidth as possible to provide best effect. The only fact holding us back is that it operates in an ultra-thin and lightweight convertible form, which means thermal management will Inhibit the full potential of silicon. But the truth is that the entire "Crysis Trilogy" does run at a reasonable frame rate and reaches 60fps? Well, two-thirds of the games are pretty good.

In the reverse order, Crysis 3 still manipulates the best modern gaming hardware, but with lower, more modest presets, it has surprising scalability. With a resolution of 1440×900 and a 30fps upper limit set through Riva Tuner Statistics Server, I can run smoothly with high quality textures and medium settings. In fact, some advanced graphics presets can even be converted to high quality with only small fluctuations at the target frame rate. But 60fps? It's a push, but it's doable, and it's not unusual to see it work on ultrabooks. The 13-inch screen of XPS can accept low resolution, and it does need to set a custom 1024×640 resolution.

However, in addition to the obvious degradation in image quality, these compromises are too unbearable. Ice Lake CPUs run in ultra high-performance mode, exceeding the capabilities of cooling solutions. The temperature is usually between 80 and 90 degrees Celsius, and a core can even reach 100 degrees Celsius. not good. In warmer rooms, this can lead to undesired performance degradation, but can be alleviated by the display's 48Hz support option, which may be provided for smooth media playback at 24fps. At this point, performing vertical sync will change the 60fps target to the 48fps target, and XPS performs well here, and it looks like felt Far better than locking 30.

With these results, I expect that using Crysis 2 will be easier, and this is what I get. The games that were actually optimized at the time didn't have too many issues when running on the new 2019 laptop, and that's what happened. I mean, back in the past, 720p60 on Nvidia's classic GeForce 8800GT was achievable. First of all, I found that it can reach 1920×1200 at 30fps resolution, although 1440×900 is still the best choice. Similarly, as long as the ambient temperature stays cool, 60fps is also achievable and sustainable: at high settings 1280×800 (remember, the high level of Crysis 2 is essentially low!) Can achieve the purpose and can perform well . But in the warmer room, we lost some performance again. When using super performance mode, there is a feeling that you are on the blade-I think the 30fps or 48fps ceiling may have some meaning in many games-silicon has more breathing space and will not be squeezed too hard.

With the success of Crysis 2 and its sequel, I was a bit scared of my Crysis. Yes, it will use four threads on a quad-core processor, but it does not do particularly well. Crysis originates from an era in which developers bet on the farm's CPU frequency to be higher, rather than spreading workloads across more cores-Crytek embraced it in subsequent games. But I suspect it's a dependency on a single kernel, which makes it a challenge to get a decent experience in Crysis. The 1920×1200 effect cannot be obtained at a medium setting of 30fps-the enemy's encounter will trigger a performance degradation. When running the game at a target speed of 1280×800 at 60fps, the knot phenomenon becomes more apparent. This game still looks great in some places, and it's a pretty good experience to see it play on a low-power laptop-but the main difference here is that I've played Crysis 2 and Crysis on XPS Crisis 3 was very happy. The outstanding performance of OG games did not really pay off. I found the experience frustrating.

But looking at these three games, this is a good choice for ultrabooks running on integrated graphics. In addition to the Crysis fetish, I ran Destiny 2 at a medium resolution of 1440×900, close to a locked 30fps, and The Witcher 3 ran 30fps at 720p / medium speed. This is not a high-end game, but as a value-added product for ultrabooks designed for very different use case scenarios, I think its performance is amazing. The key is the intended use case scenario. As far as I know, the ultrabook is not really designed for continuous use of the processor. The thermal budget allows for relatively high clocks, but it only takes a short time for the processor to fall back to the thermal limits of the surrounding design.

High-intensity tasks such as video coding can be broken down into custom silicon in SoCs that can perform similar tasks with a small power budget. All this can explain why my XPS can only reach the highest performance of 1.6GHz on all cores out of the box. In the ultra high performance mode, I did a good continuous activity on the impressive 3.3GHz, then dropped to 3.0GHz and then dropped to 2.4GHz. Ultimately, this is why I realized that this machine was not for me and returned it.

Gaming CPU testing on an external Thunderbolt 3 GPU case proved the problem. I connected the Ice Lake CPU to the RTX 2080 Ti so that the new quad-core architecture really worked. Here are some results that really need to look at the frame rate and frame time in context. Starting with the classic Singularity CPU test, we are focusing on multi-core testing. The test initially found that the performance of the Core i7 1065G7 is very close to the Core i7 3770K, but not far from the 4790K. Both of them run at the speed of stock. However, the Ashes CPU test takes three minutes-as the workbench is extended, the differences between Ice Lake and other desktop chips become more apparent, and there is a large gap in performance when the sequence is completed

Ashes is a large multi-threaded CPU workbench, so I also tried a few different approaches-our classic Crysis 3 CPU workbench, but this has been achieved after that Run the Ashes test, so we can assume the Ice Lake chip has the shortest cooling time. The clock goes down, while the 3770K and 4790K maintain a fairly consistent advantage. The performance of the 3770K is about 88% and the performance of the 4790K is about 78%. Core utilization is not as high as Ashes, suggesting closer results. However, I am willing to bet that with better cooling solutions, the results will be closer. And I do think that when looking at these results, we need to take a step back and keep in mind that we are talking about a superbook 2-in-1 against a very power-hungry desktop CPU, and a bigger, more efficient Cooling solution.

In short, real-world games are not ideal for how ultrabook designs work-shorter, longer-lasting workloads will run at higher clock frequencies and provide a faster experience while immersing all cores The task will be significantly reduced. Participating in super performance mode can unlock more potential of Ice Lake, but I did find that the ongoing struggle between performance and thermal management may even cause Windows 10 to stagnate, and the fan noise is not good at all. I pushed the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 to a very uncomfortable place, and its workload wasn't really designed for the ultrabook, and understandably it didn't really work-but that's not the end of the Ice Lake story.

Intel's new 10nm chips have even more advantages. Ice Lake laptops with 25W TDP are emerging, laptops with better heat sinks are coming out, and even products that pair Ice Lake with discrete GPUs are in production. In fact, this is cool because it means that the CPU needs to compete with the GPU for bandwidth, which opens the door to better performance. I look forward to the new Razer Blade Stealth because it combines 25W Ice Lake i7 with GTX 1650 in a more traditional ultrabook case. This is not to say that XPS is a deregistered product-far from it. With some careful adjustments, XPS can produce very good results in a series of games that have not been operated with integrated graphics solutions in the past. As a nice bonus beyond its main purpose, gaming on the XPS 13 can be fun, but if you're after a mobile gaming solution once and for all, with almost no adjustments, it's worth considering other options.