We challenge all systems’ graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The next pair, Steel Nomad’s regular and Light subtests, assesses gaming geometry and particle effects. Last, we turn to Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance.
Our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at the system’s full HD (1080p or 1200p native) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively. If the screen is capable of a higher resolution, we rerun the tests at the QHD equivalent of 1440p or 1600p. Each game runs at two sets of graphics settings per resolution for up to four runs total on each game.
We run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Minimum graphics preset—aimed at maximizing frame rates to test display refresh rates—and again at the Extreme preset. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs fully, so we run it on the Ultra graphics preset and again at the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 represents our DLSS effectiveness (or FSR on AMD systems) test, demonstrating a GPU’s capacity for frame-boosting upscaling technologies. The capacity of these frame-rate boosts changes with the version of frame-generation tech available, with DLSS 2 and 3 stitching in one AI-generated frame for every originally rendered frame, and the latest DLSS 4 inserting up to three additional frames. (FSR can generate up to four new frames per original, while XeSS can only stitch in one new frame per original frame.)
In the 3DMark tests, the Razer Blade 18 leveraged the best-in-class RTX 5090 laptop graphics to jaw-dropping scores, frequently exceeding even top-rated machines like the Alienware 18 and the 16-inch Razer Blade, which both had the same Nvidia RTX 5090 laptop GPU inside. These three systems battled for first place throughout our pure graphics-rendering tests, showing that the Blade 18 successfully kept pace with much larger machines.
But the Razer Blade 18’s advantage over the step-down 5080 systems was even more telling. These weren’t small gains in performance; this lesser GPU was a whole level below the 5090. This discrepancy showed most sharply in the true gaming benchmarks, where the Razer Blade 18 often pushed 10 to 15 (sometimes 20 to 30) more frames per second than the 5080 machines. In most of these tests, the less thermally constrained Alienware took the lead, but the differences were often in the single digits at triple-digit frame rates.
Oh, and that dual-mode display that drops the resolution to 1200p to boost the peak refresh rate to 440Hz? That was far less reliable. When I ran the same benchmarks in this low-res/high-refresh mode, I didn’t see any drastic performance improvement. I actually saw max frame rates drop in our benchmarking titles.
This dual-mode display is a specialized feature specifically for gamers playing low-resolution games in a competitive setting; think Counter‑Strike 2, Rainbow Six Siege, or Fortnite. To get anywhere close to 440 frames per second, you must reduce the resolution and detail settings close to, or to, their minimums. For anything else, the hassle of switching screen modes and then navigating on the 18-inch screen in crummy low resolution doesn’t actually have any benefit.
