Hi everyone,
I received my new Alienware 17 about 2 weeks ago. It's a great looking machine and I'm very happy with it so far. It's arrival coincided with the steam sales, so I've really had a good opportunity to put it through it's paces with some new games and mostly it's performed admirably so far. In its biggest test so far, I've started playing Bioshock: Infinite, and have the graphics settings running at 1920 x 1080 in "very high" quality. Note the highest quality detail is "ultra". I assume the game is able to detect what hardware I have and defaults to an appropriate setting. For the most part, the game runs brilliantly, very smooth frame rate around 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time, when the game's drawing something difficult, ie smoke, large panoramic shots with lots of activity the frame rate decreases somewhat, to a playable but certainly less than desirable standard.
I could drop the graphics quality, but after spending a large amount on a new high performance gaming system, I feel I should be able to run this game at the highest settings with a smooth frame rate. My questions are this: I realise Bioshock is pretty resource intensive, but should my computer be able to play it on full graphics settings comfortably? Is my system optimally configured? I installed the latest drivers for everything I could get my hands on, but perhaps not - is there a way to check across the board if everything is the latest and best? Is it worthwhile doing some benchmarking type tests to see if the computer is providing the output it should be, and how do I go about doing this (I am a complete novice in regards to benchmarking so I need my hand held here)?
Thanks everyone for reading - and I eagerly await your responses and advice.
Thanks!
Specs below:
Alienware 17
16GB Dual Channel DDR3L at 1600MHz
750G/7200 RPM + 64G caching mSATA
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M with 4GB GDDR5
4th Gen Intel Core i7-4700MQ
17.3 WLED FHD 1920 x 1080 AG 300 Nit
I received my new Alienware 17 about 2 weeks ago. It's a great looking machine and I'm very happy with it so far. It's arrival coincided with the steam sales, so I've really had a good opportunity to put it through it's paces with some new games and mostly it's performed admirably so far. In its biggest test so far, I've started playing Bioshock: Infinite, and have the graphics settings running at 1920 x 1080 in "very high" quality. Note the highest quality detail is "ultra". I assume the game is able to detect what hardware I have and defaults to an appropriate setting. For the most part, the game runs brilliantly, very smooth frame rate around 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time, when the game's drawing something difficult, ie smoke, large panoramic shots with lots of activity the frame rate decreases somewhat, to a playable but certainly less than desirable standard.
I could drop the graphics quality, but after spending a large amount on a new high performance gaming system, I feel I should be able to run this game at the highest settings with a smooth frame rate. My questions are this: I realise Bioshock is pretty resource intensive, but should my computer be able to play it on full graphics settings comfortably? Is my system optimally configured? I installed the latest drivers for everything I could get my hands on, but perhaps not - is there a way to check across the board if everything is the latest and best? Is it worthwhile doing some benchmarking type tests to see if the computer is providing the output it should be, and how do I go about doing this (I am a complete novice in regards to benchmarking so I need my hand held here)?
Thanks everyone for reading - and I eagerly await your responses and advice.
Thanks!
Specs below:
Alienware 17
16GB Dual Channel DDR3L at 1600MHz
750G/7200 RPM + 64G caching mSATA
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M with 4GB GDDR5
4th Gen Intel Core i7-4700MQ
17.3 WLED FHD 1920 x 1080 AG 300 Nit