Gaming with the Acer Aspire 5943G

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days

We set the display configurations to 1366×768, “high” texture resolution, “0” anti-aliasing and no anisotropic filtering. Shadow details and level of details each set to “high”, while the ambient occlusion is turned on. Under such setting, the game ran at around 30-50 FPS. We did not notice any significant slowdown, even in battles with lots of explosions involved. You can improve the image quality by increasing the amount of anisotropic filtering samples with only a minor performance hit.

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

Price of Persia retains most of the graphics quality and performance from its original console version. We ran the game at 1366×768. Anti-aliasing and v-sync were turned off, while the graphics setting and texture resolution each set to “high”. The result was very good. Our Persian prince jumps and runs through the game without too much of a performance drop to slow him down. The FPS count hovered at 35 to 60 frames per second.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Our first attempt using “high” graphics settings and 1366×768 resolution yielded a poor frame rate of around 10 FPS, which practically renders the game unplayable. Lowering the graphics setting to “medium” increased the frame rate dramatically by around 30 to 40 FPS. After that, we got inside the “advanced” setting menu and lowered the anti-aliasing setting to 1x. That single change solved our every problem! Without anti-aliasing, we were even able to play the game under “high” graphics setting while still getting an acceptable frame rate of 25 to 40 FPS.

Conclusions

This high performance notebook runs most of our games with acceptable frame rates, although we had to compromise a bit with the graphics quality settings here and there. The frame rate in each game is relatively stable also. One thing about this notebook that bothered us the most is the temperature of its processor, which happens to be situated right beneath the WSAD keys. During our test, the CPU’s temperature reached as high as 75 degree celcius, making those particular keys uncomfortably hot during prolonged gaming sessions. Aside from that, the processor’s automatic throttle-down mechanism kicks in whenever the temperature gets too high, resulting in significant performance drops in CPU-bound games such as Mafia II and every other open-world titles.