After a week of playing on nothing but Panther Lake laptops, it’s safe to say that Intel has its gaming mojo back

Intel have had a bit of a wild ride as of late. In many ways, the past two years have been some of the roughest in the company’s history: a massive, multi-billion dollar quarterly loss back in 2024 was enough to cost then-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger his job, and their flagship Core Ultra 200S desktop chips have fallen flat in games, ceding even more ground to archrival AMD.

There are still some bright spots, however. After the relative success of Intel’s Lunar Lake laptop processors in 2024, their successor family of Panther Lake CPUs – or to use the official name, Core Ultra Series 3 – is being heaped with praise from nearly all quarters. Not least thanks to the integrated Arc B390 GPU, which on paper, promises the same gaming power as a discrete Nvidia RTX 4050. Having a few of these laptops on hand, I decided to test Panther Lake’s chops for myself by spending a full week with them as my everyday games machines.

First off, let’s just quickly run through the specs on the laptops I subjected to my experiment. Primarily, I used an Asus ZenBook Duo 2026, powered by an Intel Core Ultra X9 388 with a 12 Xe3-core Arc B390 iGPU, along with 32GB LPDDR5 of system memory and a 1TB PCIe SSD. This is about high-end a system as you’re going to get out of Panther Lake right now, so it’s a good representative of the kind of high-end, thin and light system you’ll find on the market right now. And while this is a dual-screen laptop, I made sure to use the laptop in clamshell mode (with the keyboard covering the second screen) when playing.

The other systems I used during the week were the MSI Prestige Flip 14 AI+, the Samsung Galaxy Book6 Pro, and the Asus ExpertBook, all of which came equipped with the Core Ultra X7 358H chip with Arc B390 iGPU, 32GB LPDDR5 system memory, and between 1TB and 2TB of PCIe SSD storage. These laptops can be found for less than $1,600, with the MSI Prestige 14 AI+ selling for as low as $1,250, so they all show what a midrange laptop with a decent Panther Lake chip is capable of.

Thin and light laptops have been capable of gaming for years, but only to a point. If you wanted to play Civilization VI or World of Warcraft on reduced settings, that’s been easily done for ages. Where gaming hit a wall was with demanding fare like Cyberpunk 2077, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, and Path of Exile 2. These, naturally, would be the games I’d focus on for my week of Panther Lake playing, and seven days later, I closed the final lid with a firm conclusion: yes, they really are that good.

I’ve tested laptops and high-end gaming hardware for more than half a decade professionally, and I’ve never seen a mobile processor do what the Intel Core Ultra X7 and X9 with Arc B390 pull off. Keeping the resolution to 1080p/1200p, graphics set to slightly below the highest settings presets, ray tracing turned off, and setting Intel XeSS to balanced (no frame generation), I managed to maintain consistent 45+ to 60fps averages in just about every game I tried.

In some instances, there was slight stuttering, like when dealing with a massive wave of Darktide’s Poxwalkers, but it never got bad enough to feel like an issue. Besides, even on my desktop PC – with its RTX 5080, AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and 32GB of DDR5 memory – this game has presented similar issues, so I’m less inclined to blame the hardware.

A more acute stress-tester turned out to be Doom: The Dark Ages, which only ran north of 45-50fps at 1080p with more severely reduced settings. If you’re playing on a 14-inch Panther Lake laptop, these compromises might not be noticeable, but they are apparent on a 16-inch device. This might change with better driver support down the line, but for now, this was by far the most challenging game for Intel’s iGPU to handle.

These two game do seem to be the outliers, though, as Cyberpunk 2077 was able to hit 50-60 fps on average, with slowdowns to the mid-40s during the fiercest firefights (like Johnny Silverhand’s assault on Arasaka Tower toward the end of the first act). But again, it never felt like an issue that was meaningfully impairing my enjoyment, even if I did notice it when it happened.

Path of Exile 2 was the most forgiving of the games I played, mostly averaging around 70fps with only rare dips into the mid-50s. This was the game I spent the least amount of time with, however, so my day and a half with it might not have gotten me far enough along to hit any major fights that could bog things down. Even so, the game looks gorgeous at 1080p on High settings and Balanced-level XeSS, so if things do become an issue, you can always switch XeSS to Performance or tweak the graphics settings a bit and not really lose much in terms of visuals.

One thing I have to add is that playing these games on battery power made no difference to performance. Where even the best gaming laptops on the market can see their framerates tank once unplugged from the wall, I didn’t see any difference between its plugged-in performance versus battery-only. Of course, this will depend on what you have your system power profile set to, but so long as the power profile for plugged-in and battery power are the same, Panther Lake is equally capable of keeping games running nicely.

As for the strictly CPU side of things, there was no really noticeable difference between the Core Ultra X7 and the Core Ultra X9 in games, even if the X9 gets slightly better scores in synthetic benchmarks like Cinebench or 3DMark.

The Arc B390 is not a miracle worker, and despite its supposed ray tracing support, I couldn’t get a decent framerate out of any of my test games with RT effects enabled – even after dropping the resolution below 1080p. In terms of bonus features, though, XeSS frame generation works decently. Provided I could wrangle at least 45-50fps out of a game without it, subsequently enabled FG did always produce a bump in visual smoothness, and without introducing any noticeable latency.

Fortunately, Intel’s Panther Lake iGPU stands on its own merits in this laptop weight class, so it doesn’t need to rely on frame generation to claim impressive framerates by thin and light standards. It’s more just a nice-to-have feature for those who want it.

Intel will, at least for a while, play at a disadvantage in the desktop CPU game; AMD’s Ryzen processors were already a force to be reckoned with before they introduced 3D V-Cache and sped off into the distance. The former’s strongest area of control remains their laptop chips, so given the rather middling gaming performance of the Intel Core Ultra 200S series, it’d be disastrous for Intel if their red rivals were to muscle in here as well.

On the strength of these Panther Lake performance, though, I can’t see that happening. For games specifically, nothing else on the market offers anything close to the Arc B390 at anything resembling an accessible price point; Nvidia’s upcoming RTX Spark SoC is making bold claims about performance, but its specs suggest a very premium price indeed.

What’s more, Panther Lake shows incredible promise as a processor for Steam Deck-style handheld PCs. AMD currently owns most of that market with its Ryzen Z-series chips, not to mention the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED’s custom Ryzen APUs, but the Intel Lunar Lake-powered MSI Claw 8 AI+ is already among the best handheld performers money can buy – and the Panther Lake family’s Arc G3 Extreme chip, with the familiar Arc B390 GPU, is already confirmed to power its replacement, the Claw 8 EX AI+.

Will it be enough to make up for Intel’s desktop disappointments? No – only Nova Lake, a new flagship series coming later this year, can do that. Still, through all of the gloom, Panther Lake does provide a ray of optimism for Intel’s gaming future.