Mists Of Pandaria, Skyrim, And Shogun 2
World Of Warcraft: Mist Of Pandaria
World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria offers a lush expansion with highly detailed new worlds. One of the most demanding sections of the game is in Honeydew Villiage. Placing a character directly in-between the guards of the entrance to the city when it’s raining in-game, then panning the camera just above the grassy hill beside them brings a very high number of moving objects into view. It is one of the worst-case scenarios that we’ve found in the game.
There are a ton of moving components in our test sequence. The Radeon HD 7970M achieves triple-digit frame rates much of the time, but in this area, performance slows to a still-respectable 40 FPS. In light of the two Core i7-based machines still scaling based on resolution, it's clear that MSI's GX60 is still processor-bound.
Taking the preset down to High provides a bump in frame rates, though with 40 FPS at Ultra, this reduction is not needed on the GX60.
A severe CPU bottleneck helps the Blade's GeForce GTX 660M pass the Radeon HD 7970M. But again, when we're seeing 40 FPS using the Ultra setting, there's really no reason to step back to lower-quality presets.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Benchmark settings for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim are the same as those in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: PC Performance, Benchmarked.
At nearly 40 FPS, the GX60 has no problems playing Skyrim with maxed settings. Of course, it's plain to see that the APU in MSI's notebook is holding the system back from better performance.
While dropping down to the High quality preset lightens the load enough for a 10 FPS-higher average, there's really no need to do that in Skyrim. It was playable enough at the Ultra settings.
The same observation is doubly true for the Medium quality preset. Yes, it facilitates better performance, but we'd rather have the nicer-looking graphics, frankly.
Total War: Shogun 2
The Radeon HD 7970M is slightly ahead of the GeForce GTX 680M at 48 FPS. Clearly, you can play Shogun 2 with everything maxed out on the GX60.
Turning off anti-aliasing doubles frame rates on the Nvidia cards.
Running the built-in 720p benchmark yields just under 70 FPS on the GX60.
