MSI GX60 Review: Radeon HD 7970M In A $1,200 Notebook!

Black Ops II, Battlefield 3, And Sniper Elite V2

Call of Duty: Black Ops II

Benchmark settings for Call of Duty: Black Ops II are the same as those in Call Of Duty: Black Ops II Graphics Performance, Benchmarked.

The GX60 has no problems with frame rates in Black Ops II, aside from a fairly obvious platform bottleneck. Even at the highest settings, the Radeon HD 7970M doesn’t appear to have any problems keeping up with the GeForce GTX 680M, though.

Knocking the details down a bit doesn’t increase this platform's frame rates. At least in our benchmark, too-slow of an APU keeps us from enjoying frame rates that exceed an average of 43 FPS.

Stepping down to low details alleviates the bottleneck somewhat, though not as much as on the two comparison machines with Nvidia GPUs in them. But because we get more than 40 FPS in one of the most demanding parts of the game with all settings maxed out, we don’t see any reason to worry about playing Black Ops II on the GX60.

Battlefield 3

Benchmark settings for Battlefield 3 are the same as those in Battlefield 3 Performance: 30+ Graphics Cards, Benchmarked.

Battlefield 3 also shows the GX60’s Radeon HD 7970M capable of handling maximum detail settings without an issue. It holds a slight edge over the GeForce GTX 680M at higher resolutions, while it more than doubles the performance of the GeForce GTX 660M often found in similarly-priced machines.

Taking the details down to High quality yields a slight increase in average frame rate, though the Nvidia-based solutions get more of a speed-up.

Dropping to Medium quality yields another slight bump. We again see evidence of a platform bottleneck, though, as the M18x is now quite a bit faster at every tested resolution. Fortunately, most folks are going to want to game at this machine's native resolution. And with frame rates that look plenty playable using Ultra quality settings, the GX60 maintains its advantage. 

Sniper Elite V2

The built-in benchmark for Sniper Elite V2 places a lighter-than-usual load on a system’s CPU, but delivers a punishing GPU workload. These benchmarks demonstrate the raw GPU processing power the GX60’s Radeon HD 7970M possesses.

With settings maxed-out at Ultra quality, AMD's Radeon HD 7970M crushes the two Nvidia cards. The GX60 will obviously play Sniper Elite V2 at any setting.

Throttling down to the High quality preset changes very little about the placing of these three mobile platforms.

Dropping to Medium quality settings allows each configuration to continue speeding up. So far, the loss of fidelity doesn't seem to be shifting the workload balance to any of the host processors.

Finally, all cards scale up at the Low quality preset. It’s interesting to note that at 1920x1080, the Radeon HD 7970M is faster with Ultra settings than the GeForce GTX 680M at Low.