Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Ah, yes, but can it play Crysis? There, we beat you to it...

If there’s one game to prove whether a graphics card has enough performance to cope with any game you might throw at it, it’s Crysis. Even though the game released in November 2007, it still remains one of the most visually stunning games around, with volumetric fog, crisp textures and more eye-candy than an optician’s sweet shop.

We tested the game using the 64-bit executable under DirectX 10 mode with the 1.21 patch applied. We used a custom timedemo recorded from the Assault Harbor level, and used 2x AA but no AF.We repeat each test three times, discarding anomalous results and averaging the consistent ones.


We've updated our graphics testing procedure since we last looked at a gaming laptop, so previous results aren't comparable to these.

Read our Performance Analysis

Battery Life

Testing the battery life of laptops is a contentious thing – do you test for the absolute best-case by disabling everything and leaving the CPU to idle, or do you set a film to loop and measure that? Both of these tests are unrepresentative of what you’ll use for your laptop for the most – a bit of work and web-browsing while on the sofa. We’ve therefore chosen to test by loading up a website with a bit of light Flash animation, which loads the CPU with a moderate amount of work (about 5 per cent CPU load on this laptop). We’ve left the WiFi on, but let Windows dim the screen to half brightness, and also disabled the screensaver and the ability to turn the screen off. Finally, we entered the advanced battery options to make sure that the laptop won’t go to sleep, ensuring that we used the full life of the battery.

Battery Capacities

• Asus G73 Gaming Laptop: 5,200mAh
  
• Samsung X120 ultraportable: 8,850mAh
  
• 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Solo SU3500 + 2GB 800MHz DDR2 ultraportable laptop: 5,200mAh
  
• 1.66GHz Intel Atom N280 + 1GB 800MHz DDR2 ultraportable laptop: 5,900mAh
  
• 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 + 1GB 800MHz DDR2 ultraportable laptop: 4,400mAh

Read our Performance Analysis