Dell XPS 15 Haswell Edition: QHD+ with a Refined Design
by Jarred Walton on March 6, 2014 7:00 AM ESTDell XPS 15: Gaming Performance
With that lengthy preface about throttling, let’s just make it clear that all of the benchmark results here are from post-reboot testing, so throttling should not be present. What we find is that the GT 750M is a reasonable mainstream mobile GPU that can easily handle our “Value” settings and outside of the most demanding titles (e.g. Metro: Last Light) it can run our “Mainstream” settings as well. Not surprisingly, “Enthusiast” quality is mostly out of the question, except with older and/or less demanding titles. As for gaming at the native 3200x1800 resolution, that’s generally more than you can hope to get out of the GT 750M. Some games will certainly break 30 FPS at low to moderate settings, but in most cases opting for a lower resolution with higher quality settings will provide the better experience.
I also want to make note here that with 2014, we’re going to be reducing the number of games we test in our laptop reviews. There’s a real concern that running too many GPU-centric tests can distract from the overall target market for a device. While I’ve gone ahead and included most of the games from our 2013 test suite in Mobile Bench, moving forward we have decided to focus on just four games. Our current list consists of Bioshock Infinite, GRID 2, Metro: Last Light, and StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm. These should provide a sufficient amount of data that we’ll be able to say how well a system handles gaming workloads. In some reviews we will also include other titles (e.g. if there’s a new GPU that warrants additional investigative work), including some less demanding games that will better illustrate the “casual gaming” aspect.
Considering this isn’t really being targeted at a gaming audience – Dell has their Alienware brand if that’s what you’re after – the XPS 15 still manages to hold its own in the gaming tests. Throttling concerns aside, when the fans and GPU are running as expected, gaming at one fourth the native resolution and high detail settings is easily accomplished, and even 1080p medium/high detail is possible.
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Penti - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
Of course Apple hasn't, but a high "virtual" res rescaled to lower looks better then wise versa. Spanned would be awful in Windows for that matter, right now that is.jphughan - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
True, and Windows 8.1 can do that too as long as you set the HiDPI panel as primary. Apple does have the advantage of allowing you to optimize for a non-primary display though, which is handy when presenting if you want the presentation display to be sharpest but want to keep your desktop icons and such on your built-in panel.peterfares - Saturday, March 8, 2014 - link
Actually with 8.1 they added the ability for the program to actually switch which DPI it's rendering at on the fly. It's called Per-Monitor DPI-Awareness. There was even a demo video of moving an application between two monitors. The one where the majority of the application on is what scaling setting it uses to render and then scales for the other one. As soon as it is mostly on the other screen it switches to the other screen's DPI. I'm having trouble finding the video, but here is the MSDN documentation for it.http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/de...
Unfortunately it seems like Microsoft themselves hardly made use of it. Not even File Explorer supports it! I think IE does, but I can't remember.
peterfares - Saturday, March 8, 2014 - link
Here is a demo application to try it out! Scroll to the bottom. Works perfectly on my computer.http://emoacht.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/per-monito...
Penti - Saturday, March 8, 2014 - link
As said, ie doesn't really use it but it does use it to detect the setting per screen and then scale by zooming. Expect apps to work differently and mostly handle this themselves.AbbyYen - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
retarded shrinken arrow keys...Pls Stop copying the fruit's product!
you're a pc, your strength is in Gaming and productivity?.... BABY DON'T PLAY GAMES! MATURE with big fingers do!
MySchizoBuddy - Friday, March 7, 2014 - link
what an ignorant view of Apple products.Rdmkr - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
Not to be a nitpicker but please distinguish properly between qHD and QHD:qHD: quarter HD, 1/4 the pixels of 1080p
QHD: quad HD, 4 times the pixels of 720p (QHD+: 4x 900p)
(and yes, obnoxiously enough they couldn't be consistent about what to call "HD" within this naming scheme)
JarredWalton - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
I believe I referred to it correctly as qHD+ everywhere, which is 4 x HD+, or four times 1600x900. If I missed the plus signs anywhere, let me know and I'll go fix it.duynguyenle - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link
You missed the point entirely, it's got nothing to do at all with the plus sign, it's about the upper/lowercase letter Q in front of the HD, specifically, qHD (with the lowercase q) refers to resolution of 960x540, usually a phone or mobile device resolution) whereas QHD (uppercase Q) is quad-HD, which is the resolution used in this particular laptop