Ultrabooks such as the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga aren’t designed to be serious gaming machines. However, even though these systems don’t have discrete graphics engines, Intel's latest iteration of IGP can still handle casual gaming. To see how the ThinkPad Yoga fares, we fired up 3DMark11, Cloud Gate, and Far Cry 2.
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Futuremark 3DMark 11 |
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Simulated Gaming Performance |
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As a synthetic gaming benchmark, 3DMark 11 puts extra emphasis on your system’s handling of DirectX 11. However, 3DMark 11 measures more than just the graphics card’s performance; the processor has a definite influence on the score. As a result, this benchmark is a good way to get a feel for how well the system can handle gaming and general computing tasks.
In 3DMark 11, the ThinkPad Yoga wasn’t quite as impressive, falling to the similarly-spec’d Yoga 2 Pro, but considering the other systems that posted better scores all have higher-end specs, it’s not a bad score.
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Futuremark 3DMark Cloud Gate |
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Simulated Gaming Performance |
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3DMark is the flagship benchmark in Futuremark’s catalog. As a result, it is a popular choice for testing all types of computers. Recognizing the technology differences between different types of PCs are significant, 3DMark has a separate test suite for each device category. The Cloud Gate test is aimed at entry-level PCs and laptops. It has two subtests: a processor-intensive physics test and two graphics tests. Cloud Gate uses a DirectX 11 engine but the graphics are designed to be compatible with DirectX 10 systems. We ran the test suite at its default 1280 x 720 resolution and at default rendering quality settings. It’s important to remember that 3DMark Cloud Gate scores aren’t comparable to scores from other categories such as 3DMark Fire Strike (gaming PCs) or Ice Storm (smartphones and tablets).
The scores in 3DMark Cloud Gate are mostly tightly clustered, but--wouldn’t you know it--our ThinkPad Yoga nudged out the whole field by a nose.
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Far Cry 2 |
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DX10 Gaming Performance |
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Far Cry 2 uses high-quality texture, complex shaders, and dynamic lighting to create a realistic environment. Using the game’s built-in benchmark, we can get a better look at a system’s performance with DirectX 10 level gaming graphics.
Like most ultrabooks, the ThinkPad Yoga can only achieve playable framerates, in even older titles with serious game engines, as long as resolution is dialed back a bit, but at least the system posted one of the better scores at 25.7 FPS. It lost out to the Yoga 2 Pro by a step or two, as well as the Core i7-equipped Dell Inspiron 14z.
