Fast, feisty, fabulous: I've benchmarked Intel's new Panther Lake processor and it's dragging gaming laptop performance out of integrated graphics

Panther Lake has finally arrived on my test bench. Well, the chip "formerly codenamed" Panther Lake, anyway. Intel would much prefer we refer to its new chip generation as the Intel Core Ultra Series 3—which is the name you'll find emblazoned on the specs sheet of many thin and light laptops in the next few months. And maybe the odd handheld eventually, too.

The headline news here is the gaming performance, as Intel has supercharged the onboard iGPU of several of its new chips to provide a sizable whack of graphics grunt. I've been testing an Asus Zenbook Duo equipped with the very tippety-top of the lineup, the Intel Core Ultra X9 388H, complete with a 12 Xe3 core-equipped Intel Arc B390 iGPU. One thing has become immediately obvious—it's a surprisingly grunty graphics cruncher when pushed to its limits.

Now, some expectation-tempering before we start. As an iGPU, the Arc B390 onboard the Core Ultra X9 388H amounts to a single, somewhat-sizable graphics tile, with 12 Xe3 cores, 12 Ray Tracing Units, 96 Xe Vector Engines and XMX engines respectively, and 16 MB of L2 cache. That's an impressive specs sheet for an integrated GPU, but compared to your average discrete unit, it's very, very small scale.

So, no-one's expecting the Arc B390 to do battle with, say, the RTX 5060 mobile found in many modern budget gaming laptops. Intel, though, is claiming it's around 10% faster than a 60 W TGP-limited RTX 4050 mobile on average, and that's a very modest slice of graphics hardware to beat in 2026.

What we should be excited about, however, is what those claims mean for sleek and slim, productivity-style, dGPU-less laptops that could almost now be classed as gaming laptops. Compress some genuine gaming performance into a single mobile chip, and you could potentially end up with a wealth of svelte, light-as-a-feather mobile machines that can handle a bit of Cyberpunk 2077 on the side.

Not to mention handhelds, the first of which I am assured will be revealed "soon". We can but dream. Anyway, on with the testing.

Intel Arc B390 iGPU benchmarks

For the purpose of direct comparison with our other iGPUs, the Lunar Lake-generation Intel Arc 140V and the Strix Point-based AMD Radeon 890M, I've recorded all my real-world gaming results at 1080p, with varying settings indicated in the charts below.

Kicking things off with Cyberpunk 2077, I already had a good idea what to expect. I got a chance to perform some quick and dirty benchmarking of the Arc B390 at CES 2026, and recorded a 53 fps average result at 1200p High settings with upscaling disabled. However, dropping CP2077 down to Medium settings (and the aforementioned 1080p res) results in a very healthy 64 fps average. I was pretty impressed back in Vegas, but now? I'm downright stoked.

Compared to the Lunar Lake and Strix Point iGPUs, the Arc B390 delivers the sort of results that look like… well, the figures you might expect from a "proper" graphics chip. It puts out nearly twice the frame rate of both iGPUs across my test suite, with similarly impressive numbers in the 1% lows.

Taking a closer look at the Black Myth: Wukong chart, it's not quite as easy of a ride for the Arc B390. Still, a 39 fps average without upscaling is definitely playable, whereas the Radeon 890M and Arc 140V deliver nothing but crunch by comparison, with 23 and 17 fps average results respectively. Still, Horizon Zero Dawn reveals a massive performance jump over its iGPU rivals, with the B390 managing to stay 28 frames ahead over its Strix Point rival, and a massive 45 frames ahead of its elder sibling.

However, at this point I'm sure you've noticed the RTX 4050 gaming laptop lurking at the bottom of my charts, consistently making all of our iGPUs look a little silly.

Now, before we go crying in our respective soups, it's worth mentioning that the Acer Nitro V 15 results were recorded at a 75 W TGP, 15 watts higher than Intel's test figures—so looking at them in direct comparison is perhaps a little unfair given the much-lower wattage the B390 has to play with.

My Panther Lake testing shows a 61 W peak for the entire chip package, CPU cores and all, so there's a whole lot less juice for the little iGPU to feed on.

That being said, I've included it as an example of what sort of gaming performance you can expect from a budget gaming laptop at similar settings—and it turns out, it's usually quite a bit more than the top-end Intel Core Ultra Series 3 iGPU can provide on its own.

Intel's "similar performance to [an] Nvidia 4050 laptop" claims are also based on a different set of benches (with different settings) over a much wider suite of games, so I'll give the benefit of the doubt here in regards to its own figures. Still, when it comes to our specific testing suite, it's clear that a relatively low-wattage RTX 4050 (its full TGP can be up to 115 W) is still capable of throwing even the fastest iGPUs in the mud in many scenarios.

However, the Nvidia GPU doesn't have it all its own way, as evidenced by the Metro Exodus: Enhanced results. The little Arc manages to beat not just its iGPU competition, but even the RTX 4050, here by six frames on average. And while that isn't a massive performance gain, it's notable as the only example in my 1080p gaming benchmarks where the B390 pulls ahead of its discrete competition.

With Quality upscaling enabled, the Arc B390 delivers a very respectable 57 fps in BM:W, whereas its competition lags behind around the 30-33 fps mark. Again, that's the difference between pretty smooth, and pretty crunchy. Or what I'd call good gaming performance, rather than acceptable.

Cyberpunk 2077 leaps to a 92 fps average, which is a pretty phenomenal result for a dGPU-less machine—although here comes the RTX 4050 to spoil the party with a 110 fps result. It's worth mentioning, though, that there's only a three fps difference in minimum frames between the two, so in terms of real-world gameplay, you'd likely struggle to tell the difference.

Another noticeable discrepancy lies in Horizon Zero Dawn, where the budget, previous generation Nvidia mobile GPU puts out a remarkably good 116 fps average. The Arc B390 still puts in an impressive showing of 94 fps, beating the 77 fps and 37 fps averages of the Radeon 890M and Arc 140V with headroom to spare, but it's still indicative of a substantial performance difference no matter which way you look at it.

Horizon Zero Dawn has a vast draw distance, and its performance has a tendency to hinge on reading and writing lots of pixel information, so I'd wager that what we're seeing here (and in some of my other results) is a memory bandwidth limitation for the iGPUs in comparison to the RTX 4050 Mobile.

The Intel chip, for example, is sharing LPDDR5X with the rest of the system, whereas the Nvidia chip has its own 192 GB/s GDDR6 to play with over a 96-bit bus.

That's a relatively narrow data highway for a GPU, but it's still got a significant amount more memory bandwidth to play with than any current integrated chip, including the Arc B390, which theoretically tops out at 74 GB/s. Still, a 94 fps average result in a still-fantastic-looking game in 2026? Yep, I'd say the B390 has done very well here.

And then there's 3DMark Time Spy. I was expecting a pretty high GPU score for the Intel chip, but I'll admit I had to double check the reviewers guide to make sure I hadn't screwed something up. A 7192 GPU index result is pretty darn fantastic, and casts a very long shadow over both the AMD and the previous-gen Intel iGPU. It's not that far behind the RTX 4050 mobile, either, even with its considerable wattage advantage.

Now, the cynic in me (and I have to admit, I'm mostly cynic) would say that we've seen previous Intel chips perform surprisingly well in 3DMark benchmarks before. Intel's various architectures seem to respond well to the challenge UL's benchmarks put in front of them, so I wouldn't necessarily take those numbers as a singular indication of performance overall. Still, it's an impressive figure, and one that Intel can wear with pride.

Looking at my gaming battery life figures, it's interesting to note that the Panther Lake chip drains the Asus Zenbook Duo's 99 Wh dual-cell battery system nine minutes faster than the Lunar Lake chip in the 75 Whr Asus Zenbook S 14.

However, given the performance difference between the two, I'd say a 40 W average throughout the test is an impressively low power draw for such a chip, and there are many differences between the two systems that could account for that slightly lower figure.

Certainly, in real world usage I've been massively impressed by the Zenbook Duo's battery life, as it managed a full day of working and light gaming with power to spare. Is this chip feeling like the future yet, or is that just me?

Panther Lake gaming performance: Analysis

Throughout my testing, I've had to keep reminding myself that I'm benchmarking an iGPU, a relatively small tile integrated into a relatively small chip. As Intel has been keen to point out during my many technical demonstrations at CES, the Arc B390 is large by iGPU standards. But hold a Core Ultra Series 3 chip in your hands, and the scale of Intel's achievement becomes obvious.

It's a tiny slip of a GPU when compared to anything other than its most direct competition. And, as I've shown with my results, it gives the Radeon 890M and Arc 140V a thorough thrashing in any gaming-related task you can throw at it. Intel has pulled off something of a magic trick here—the Arc B390 represents not just a major leap towards proper gaming performance springing from a single, CPU-inclusive die, but perhaps its actual arrival.

While a proper modern dGPU— even an entry level one—will likely streak ahead in most benchmarks, the Arc B390 has enough chutzpah to feel like one in real world usage. And that, my friends, is a pretty stonking technical achievement.

The last question, and perhaps the most important, comes down to cost. The Asus machine I have in front of me has a £2,300+ price tag (US pricing is yet to be confirmed), and being a dual-OLED equipped ultrabook, that's perhaps no surprise.

Still, I've got my doubts about this particular top-end chip appearing in machines that actually make sense as potential gaming laptop replacements, given the MSRP they're likely to be saddled with.

But the Intel Core Ultra X7 368H, a 16-core variant with the Arc B390 onboard? That leaps off the SKU list as a more affordable solution. And let's not rule out the Core Ultra 5 338H, either, a 12-core PTL chip with the Intel Arc B370, which looks a lot like the B390 but with two fewer Xe3 cores.

We'll be testing one of those the second the opportunity arises, but in the meantime, the top-end iGPU I have in front of me has certainly set some very high standards.

So, is the Intel Arc B390 the iGPU of my dreams? Well, it's pretty damn close. Certainly, I've been very impressed with the results I've found to date, and while the affordability of devices using the chip is still a large, looming question, I can't help but admire its moxie.

Do I want one in my next dGPU-less machine? Yes, absolutely. My next handheld? Certainly. My next dedicated gaming laptop? Perhaps not, if sub-$1,000 entry level machines are still a thing once the current RAMpocalypse has finished trashing the PC hardware market.

Still, the Intel iGPU feels like a quantum leap forward for integrated graphics hardware, and for that I have to applaud it. Fast, feisty, and fabulous? Oh yes—this Panther's got bite.