GPU and Storage Performance

The Core i5-5200U in the erstwhile Dell XPS thirteen and Cadre i7-6500U in the new model characteristic like GPUs on newspaper: 24 execution units, and clock speeds of 950 and 1050 MHz respectively. The difference in clock speeds is just 11%, so any operation improvements over this figure tin exist considered a win for the new Skylake U-serial parts.

In 3DMark, the new XPS 13 outperformed the old model by 25% on boilerplate in the ultrabook advisable tests, which is a decent margin considering the clock speed divergence. In games I recorded similar margins: Tomb Raider performance improved by 31%, and Metro: Last Calorie-free saw gains of 29%, both when benchmarked at the aforementioned resolution.

GPU functioning from this laptop is impressive, but the gains aren't plenty to offset the increased resolution moving from 1920 x 1080 to 3200 ten 1800. If you lot endeavour to game at QHD+, expect to encounter your frame rates drop by around 40-50 percent.

Can you game on the XPS 13 at whatever reasonable level of performance? Well that depends on the sort of title you want to play. I gave Fallout 4 a spin on the lowest possible settings (at 900p considering it refused to launch at 720p), and frame rates sabbatum around twenty FPS, which is unplayable. Tomb Raider was playable on low settings at 900p, and older or less intensive games ran quite well, such as Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (at 900p) and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (at 1080p with Very High settings).

Storage performance from the 256 GB NVMe drive in my review unit was very expert. Sequential read and write speeds were above 700 and 300 GB/due south respectively, placing information technology in the territory of other high-performance laptops like the Surface Volume. But where I was almost impressed was with chart-topping random read/write operation; these types of transfers are the almost mutual, and the XPS 13 really excels hither with its Samsung drive.