First, we measure workstation performance with SPECviewperf 2020 (version 3.1), which renders, rotates, and zooms in and out of solid and wire-frame models at 1080p resolution. The three subtests represent PTC’s Creo CAD platform, Autodesk’s Maya modeling and simulation software for film, TV, and games, and Dassault Systèmes’s SolidWorks 3D-rendering package.
Next up is Blender, an open-source 3D content-creation suite for modeling, animation, simulation, and compositing. We record the time it takes for Blender 4.2 to render three distinct scenes to measure CPU and GPU rendering performance. (The Yoga Pro could not complete this test, so this test is excluded from the charts below.) Then, we run an automated PugetBench extension in Adobe Premiere Pro that tests real-world video-editing tasks, including live playback, file export, high-res encoding with different codecs, processing and decoding different types of source media, and applying GPU-accelerated special effects.
Finally, we also use PugetBench for Creators to test DaVinci Resolve Studio 18 video editor performance on systems suitable for that challenging app. As with Adobe Premiere, these automated tasks and features push the CPU and GPU, letting us gauge real-world media-creation speeds.
As the Yoga Pro 9i is an entry-level content-creation laptop, it struggled much more with the workstation benchmarks than its counterparts. These scores prove the Yoga Pro certainly can handle photo and video editing at a respectable level, but not necessarily advanced workloads, which makes sense for its class. Spending more to spring for the Apple, Asus, or Dell laptops might save you valuable time (and therefore money) in the long run.
