Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro Ultrabook Review
Gaming Benchmarks
Ultrabooks such as the Yoga 2 Pro aren’t designed to be serious gaming machines. However, even though these machines don’t have discrete graphics cards, they can still handle casual gaming. To see how the Yoga 2 Pro fares, we fired up 3DMark11, Cloud Gate, and Far Cry 2.
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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.
As has been the case with previous benchmark tests so far, the Yoga 2 Pro earned a great score and second place in our comparison chart for 3DMark 11. Although the Intel HD 4400 graphics are integrated, we see here they’re still very capable of supporting casual gaming.
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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).
Our comparison systems are rather limited here but as you can see, the Yoga 2 Pro earned the top score in comparison to the Toshiba KIRAbook and Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch.
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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.
Here again, the Yoga 2 Pro shows it can handle casual gaming just fine. This ultrabook earned second place in our comparison chart coming in behind Dell’s Inspiron 14z which has a Core i7-3317U processor and Radeon HD 7570M graphics.
