As with any laptop review at PetaPixel, we run through various benchmarks to gauge overall performance. The Razer Blade 16 (2024) and Lightroom Classic proved to be something of a mystery in the process, yielding unsatisfactory results that required further investigation.
Why would it take two hours to import 163 RAW images in 1:1 previews on the first go-round? Why would adjusting certain settings lead to wildly different results? For a robust laptop sporting an 14th-gen Intel Core i9 14900HX Raptor Lake CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX4070 GPU, something didn’t add up.
The power is technically there, as evidenced by how the laptop could run Adobe’s photo and video editing apps in real-world situations. Yes, the device gets loud and hot doing it, but it should do the job well. It wasn’t a pre-production unit, nor one running experimental or beta software. Razer’s Blade laptops are, in effect, gaming machines by design. But Razer also sees creating content as an essential value proposition every time one lifts the lid and gazes at the gorgeous OLED screen.
A Test of Time
There were two tests. The first involved importing Sony a7R IV RAW images into Lightroom Classic. The second was to import Phase One RAW photos. Doing it three times each with a stopwatch provided an average. I stored all images on the laptop’s own storage, negating any need for any cloud connectivity, as well as eliminating any possible corruption from an external SSD or memory card.
While exporting all these images as JPEG and TIFF files from Lightroom Classic to the desktop seemed to fall mostly in line with expectations for this laptop, the import times were slow and terribly inconsistent. To ensure a clean slate for every import/export, I deleted the photos and purged the cache under Preferences -> Performance before restarting the app again.
Razer engineers first surmised that the Blade 16’s Game Ready driver might be the immediate culprit. Except, switching to the Studio driver not only did nothing (imports actually took longer), it also crashed the system on two import attempts. Switching back to the Game Ready driver and turning off GPU support in Lightroom Classic’s preferences helped considerably, bringing the Sony import down from a glacial 54:12 average down to an 18:21 average. Ditto for the Phase One shots, clocking in at 30:02 — much better than the two-hour marathon in the first round.
While clearly better, those numbers still didn’t add up. Despite sending logs, BIOS, and firmware information to Razer, there had to be something else. The next step was to go to the Nvidia Control Panel and over to Manage 3D -> Program Settings and toggle on High-Performance Processor. Under these changes, the Sony Lightroom Classic import averaged 16:39, inching closer to a more palatable score. Yet, the Phase One import didn’t follow suit, going north of 40 minutes — at least 10 minutes longer than the previous series of tests.
The next step was to try uncovering a potential Adobe cause. In Lightroom Classic, going to Edit -> Preferences -> switching Use Graphics Processor to Auto and then toggling off Generate Previews in parallel made up the latest settings adjustments.
In this case, toggling off Generate Previews had a discernible effect. The Sony import fell to a 12:40 average, while the Phase One import came back down to 24:36. Better figures for sure, but simply not what you’d expect from a premium Blade laptop. Even more so when comparing those figures to other laptops tested and reviewed at PetaPixel.
A Sluggish Process
Apart from the troubleshooting examples I laid out above, I tinkered with all sorts of settings adjustments and workarounds on my own to try squaring things up. Nothing turned into a eureka moment, and all of this remains a mystery as of this report. It’s unclear whether a faulty driver or shaky handshake are why things slow down to a crawl. Is it a consequence of Raptor Lake HX chipsets, or something in how Adobe’s software works with Nvidia’s hardware?
Either way, these numbers aren’t conducive to speedy workflows for photographers. It’s hard to make the case the Blade 16 is a better choice than a MacBook Pro when the latter crushes it with faster imports. Even previous tips to optimize Lightroom Classic didn’t change the calculus enough when dealing with 1:1 previews.
It’s certainly possible the problem is specific to my review unit, though online forums abound over troubleshooting issues with importing batches in Lightroom Classic with a Blade laptop. Some also vary in focus, involving computers from various brands and workflows, not just Razer. Lightroom Classic is a common denominator, only there’s no apparent quick fix in speeding things up with the Blade 16.
So, for now, users should be wary, even if there are ways to improve performance. There aren’t normally any hoops to jump through, let alone this many.