Intel's new Core Ultra X9 388H 'Panther Lake' chip, built on the 18A node with Arc B390 integrated graphics, demonstrates performance that doubles AMD's 'Strix Point' in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p, with up to 73-82% improvements over AMD and comparable to a Radeon RX 6600, while also supporting advanced upscaling tech like XeSS3 that outperforms NVIDIA's DLSS.
Early benchmarks of Intel's upcoming Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake iGPUs have been leaked, showing the Battlemage "Xe2" iGPU for Lunar Lake to be almost 2x faster than the Alchemist iGPUs in Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake chips, and outclassing the Arc A310 graphics card. The Lunar Lake iGPU also ends up 26% faster than the Meteor Lake iGPU, and it is ahead of the Arc A310 graphics card with a 25% lead. These chips are expected to be delivered in the second half of 2024, with the Lunar Lake CPUs designed for thin and light laptops and the Arrow Lake CPUs potentially targeting high-end gaming designs.
The Intel Arc iGPU on the Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" CPUs is delivering competitive gaming performance against AMD's RDNA 3 iGPU. Reviews and benchmarks show that the Arc iGPU is performing well in gaming tests at both 1080p low and high settings, with the top configurations of the Arc iGPU winning an equal split of games against the RDNA 3 iGPU at low settings and leading in most games at high settings. The Intel Arc iGPU also outperforms NVIDIA's MX solutions and comes close to GTX 1650 Max-Q discrete GPUs. The performance gains and competitive positioning against AMD's RDNA 3 iGPU make Intel's Arc iGPU a strong contender in the integrated graphics space.
Intel's upcoming Meteor Lake Xe-LPG integrated graphics reportedly have a boost clock of up to 2.2 GHz, offering slightly more compute power than the Radeon 780M RDNA3 iGPU. The complete compute die consists of 6 Performance, 8 Efficient, and 2 Low-Power Efficient cores, with the GPU subsystem featuring 8 Xe Cores. While AMD's Phoenix APUs have found success in handheld gaming systems, Intel aims to catch up with its new Core Ultra series and potentially tap into new markets.
Intel's upcoming Meteor Lake mobile chips may have an integrated GPU powerful enough to rival Nvidia's GTX 1650 and even compete against Apple's M2 chip. The iGPU on Meteor Lake chips is said to be impressive, with laptop makers potentially able to skip using an iGPU in entry-level gaming laptops. The Meteor Lake chip is expected to have 128 execution units (EUs) and its final performance may land somewhere between the GTX 1650 and the RTX 3050, making it among the best CPUs in laptops this year. Intel's Meteor Lake chips are expected to come out near the end of the year, but only in laptops.