JPR’s Mt. Tiburon Test Lab (MTTL) put Lenovo’s new 16-inch lightweight IdeaPad notebook to the test. The IdeaPad features Intel’s 3 nm Arrow Lake-S Ultra 9 285H mobile processor. The processor has an integrated Intel Arc 140T GPU, providing increased AI processing performance, ray tracing, and gaming. We tested the IdeaPad at our MTTL using synthetic benchmarks and games with built-in benchmarking capabilities.
Lenovo introduced a 16-inch super lightweight IdeaPad notebook that uses Intel’s 3 nm Arrow Lake-S Ultra 9 285H mobile processor with Arc Xe-LPG Graphics 64EU and NPU.
The Intel Core Ultra 200H series introduced new architectures, including Lion Cove for P-cores and Skymont for E-cores. Additionally, the series has an improved neural processing unit (NPU). This update also prioritizes power efficiency, leading to increased battery life and performance per watt.
This generation’s Core Ultra 285H processor includes an integrated Intel Arc 140T GPU. The platform is based on the Xe architecture with XMX, also referred to as Xe LPG+, an updated version of the Xe architecture used in the Intel Core Ultra 100H series. The GPU offers increased performance for AI processing, ray tracing, and gaming across various usage scenarios.
The Intel Arc 140T GPU features a tile configuration with an increased L2 cache of 8MB dedicated to the GPU. It includes two render slices, each containing four Xe-cores, for a total of eight Xe-cores. This configuration supports DirectX 12 Ultimate, including hardware ray tracing and mesh shading.
Each Xe-core contains 16 Xe vector engines (XVEs) for SIMD8 width execution. The LPG+ architecture integrates Xe Matrix Extension (XMX), providing deep learning acceleration per slice with support for INT4, INT8, FP16, and BF16 data types. This enhancement improves AI processing efficiency and enables Intel XeSS AI-based game upscaling, which was not available in the previous LPG architecture (see our review here). XeSS utilizes these features to generate high-quality frames with increased frame rates. Xe Low Latency (XeLL) combined with XeSS Super Resolution (XeSS-SR) gives developers more tools to improve the visual quality, performance, and responsiveness of modern games. All XeSS 2 games will support these three technologies.
LPG+ includes a ray-tracing unit (RTU) designed to accelerate real-time ray-tracing calculations for lighting and reflections. Intel says each RTU is equipped with an optimized traversal pipeline, doubling performance compared to the previous version, and features a ray-triangle intersection unit capable of handling 12 box intersection tests per clock cycle.
The integration of frame generation with XeSS-SR significantly enhances performance in games like Marvel Rivals.
AI PC
Last year, the AI PC was introduced, and now every PC supplier wants to say they have one. But to make such a claim, you have to have at least a pretty good GPU and, if possible, an NPU.
The Intel Core Ultra 9 285H in the Lenovo IdeaPad provides iGPU-compute capabilities through the new Xe with XMX graphics architecture for AI and gaming workloads. CPU and GPU play a dual role in high-performance computing workloads, ARL-285H with 99 TOPS. Intel prepared a table with benchmarks of the competition, as shown below.
The Lenovo IdeaPad has a 16-inch 3800 × 1800 display. The Ultra 9 285H iGPU display engine can drive a single monitor up to 8K resolution at 60 Hz with HDR, utilizing HDMI 2.1 or DisplayPort 2.1. It can also handle up to four external monitors at 4K with HDR at 60 Hz. The IdeaPad has an HDMI and two USB-C ports, but one is used for input power. The integrated panel can support a refresh rate of up to 120 Hz at a WQUXGA (3840 × 2400) resolution with its support for eDP1.4b.
Benchmarking
At our Mt. Tiburon Testing Lab (MTTL), we tested the IdeaPad using synthetic benchmarks and games with built-in benchmarking capabilities. The results were admiral to surprising, making the notebook a very capable and useful system overall.
We used Intel’s 101.6458 driver and turned VSync off. Some benchmarks and games don’t give you the ability to click off VSync. However, the Intel driver panel offers three options: VSync on, Smooth Sync, and Smart VSync.
Smart VSync: Automatically enables VSync when the application’s render rate exceeds the display’s refresh rate and disables VSync when the render rate falls below the display’s refresh rate.
Smooth Sync: Is used for displays without Adaptive Sync support, blurring distracting screen tears with a dithering filter. The only pre-requisite for Smooth Sync is having VSync off.
Using Underwriter Labs’ (UL) Procyon AI test suite, we ran the office productivity test and got a score of 6833, which is right in line with other notebooks in this class. (UL acquired Futuremark, makers of 3DMark.) From a hands-on practical point of view, using Office apps was smooth, easy, and fast. We also tested it for specific AI capabilities such the Procyon AI Computer Vision Benchmark, which gives insights into how the Intel AI inference engines perform in a Windows environment. The benchmark tests CPU and GPU performance; not surprisingly, the GPU performed better.
In the benchmark, common machine-vision tasks are executed using a range of popular, state-of-the-art neural networks. A well-deserved callout to UL, which helped us get the benchmark running.
UL’s benchmark suite offers a lot of very useful tests that can give tremendous insight into how a system will perform, and we ran five of them. The Lenovo IdeaPad has a native resolution of 2880 × 1800, and most of the benchmarks allowed that selection. We used three resolutions: 1800, 1440, and 1080.
3DMark’s Time Spy is a DirectX 12 benchmark test for Windows 10 gaming PCs. Time Spy is one of the first DirectX 12 apps to be built the right way, from the ground up, to fully realize the performance gains that the new API offers. Time Spy also offers CPU and GPU testing. The GPU results are expressed in frames per second (fps).
With its dedicated DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, Time Spy is the ideal test for benchmarking the latest GPUs.
Steel Nomad uses graphics technologies just like favorite new game titles to provide a good idea of how your system will run the latest PC and mobile games without ray tracing. Steel Nomad didn’t offer a 2800 × 1800-resolution choice, so we only ran 1080 and 1440.
Set at night, with the Steel Nomad desert basin flooded by a vast lake, Steel Nomad Light is more accessible for lightweight and portable systems, lowering the rendering resolution to 1440p and removing or reducing some of the most demanding graphical techniques used in Steel Nomad. Make no mistake though, Steel Nomad is still a very demanding benchmark for the latest phones, tablets, and lightweight laptops.
3DMark Port Royal was the world’s first dedicated real-time ray-tracing benchmark for gamers. It can be used to test and compare the real-time ray-tracing performance of any GPU that supports Microsoft DirectX Raytracing.
Port Royal is a really high-stress ray-tracing test with dozens of reflective surfaces. As well as benchmarking performance, 3DMark Port Royal provides a realistic and practical example of what to expect from ray tracing in upcoming games.
3DMark Speed Way is a DirectX 12 Ultimate benchmark for gaming PCs running Windows 10 and 11.
Speed Way’s engine was developed to demonstrate the new features DirectX 12 Ultimate brings to ray-traced gaming. Speed Way uses DirectX Raytracing Tier 1.1 for real-time global illumination and real-time ray-traced reflections, coupled with new DirectX 12 Ultimate performance optimizations like mesh shaders.
UL’s 3DMark Intel XeSS Feature test (Xe Super Sampling) tests Intel’s graphics technology that uses AI-enhanced upscaling to improve performance while maintaining high image fidelity.
The 3DMark Intel XeSS feature test shows how XeSS affects performance and quality. The frame inspector tool compares image quality with an interactive side-by-side comparison of XeSS and native-resolution rendering.
The Blender benchmark score refers to the hardware’s ability to process samples during Cycles rendering. In particular, it’s the amount of samples per minute that a CPU or GPU can compute. The higher this number, the better.
In order to visualize, share, and explore the data, we’ve built opendata.blender.org. The data hosted on the website is available under public domain, it is updated in near-real time after every benchmark, and it is easily processable and well documented.
Geekbench 6 measures a processor’s single-core and multi-core power, for everything from checking email to taking a picture to playing music, or all of it at once.
Geekbench 6’s CPU benchmark measures performance in new application areas including augmented reality and machine learning.
GameTechBench was developed by Linus to contribute to the global community that reports an fps value and a score.
It’s a new benchmark and has a small but loving following. Time will tell if it becomes a quasi-industry standard.
Cinebench 2024, developed by 3D modeling software developer Maxon, uses the company’s ray-tracing program, Redshift, Maxon Cinema 4D’s default rendering engine, to evaluate a computer’s CPU and GPU capabilities.
Cinebench 2024 runs on x86/64 architecture (Intel/AMD) on Windows and macOS; it also has been extended to Apple macOS and Arm64 CPUs on Windows. Cinebench 2024 streamlines the benchmarking process by utilizing a consistent scene file for both CPU and GPU testing.
Last but not least is BapCo’s CrossMark benchmark. It runs on Windows, Android, Linux, ChromeOS, iOS, and macOS platforms.
The benchmark offers scores for common applications such as creativity, productivity, and responsiveness.
Gaming on a laptop
Every year, gaming on a notebook gets better. The iGPUs are improving faster than new bleeding-edge AAA FPS games are being introduced. That means that although you may not be able to play many high-end FPSs on a notebook, there are plenty of last-gen games that run perfectly. And, most gamers have mostly older games, so now they can take them with them.
Total War: Warhammer III is a turn-based strategy and real-time tactics video game released in 2022 and developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega.
It is part of the Total War series and the third to be set in Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy fictional universe.
F1 22 is a racing video game developed by Codemasters and published by EA Sports. It is the 15th entry in the F1 series and was released in 2022.
The game holds an official license of the 2022 Formula One and Formula Two championships.
Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world, action-adventure RPG set in the dark future of Night City—a dangerous megalopolis obsessed with power, glamour, and ceaseless body modification, developed by CD Projekt Red in 2020 and updated in 2022.
One of the first heavily ray-traced open-world games, it was upgraded with a spy-thriller expansion Phantom Liberty.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an all-time favorite action-adventure game developed by Eidos-Montréal.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition was released on November 5, 2019, and runs on DirectX 12.
Final Fantasy XV, published by Square Enix, was released for Windows in March 2018.
The game can drive high-resolution displays with HDR10, and offers a beautiful and carefully crafted experience of the series.
Older games like Crysis 3 (2013) and Batman: Arkham Knight (2015) hold up to this day without featuring any ray tracing.
PMark
We introduced the PMark in 2011 to give a more balanced evaluation of a graphics add-in board or system. It uses the formula:
Performance, however, can be measured in multiple ways: by fps, fps/resolution, an arbitrary score, or a score based on the elapsed time to complete a benchmark. To simplify the report, we lumped the resolutions (1800, 1440, and 1080) together and scaled the score values to arrive at three PMark measurements, shown in Figure 19.
The Lenovo IdeaPad with the new Intel Ultra 9 285H is a real winner in all categories and very affordable, a perfect all-around machine. It only draws about 55W and weighs 2.12 kg (4 pounds, 11 oz), which is pretty light for a 16-inch notebook.
Conclusion
The IdeaPad can run all productivity applications and deliver very respectable gaming performance. It uses 20% of the power a high-end graphics AIB uses and costs less than a high-end graphics AIB. This makes the IdeaPad a remarkable value and a useful device with a large screen and a very long battery life.
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