Panther Lake really does seem to deliver: Intel’s new Arc B390 iGPU shows huge performance gains over the current AMD competition in initial gaming tests – with one exception.
At CES 2026, Intel made a lot of promises in the context of mobile GPUs – and the first benchmarks indicate that the chip manufacturer is delivering on those promises. With the introduction of the “Panther Lake” generation, which you will find under the “Core Ultra 300” series, the next step in the laptop sector is set to be a success.
At the top of the generation are the CPU variants with the iGPU Arc B390 as the largest configuration. These are marked with an “X” in their name. This is also the case with the flagship model Core Ultra X9 388H, which our colleagues at ComputerBase were able to test at the CES trade show and are now presenting their results.
Performance (almost) in a class of its own
In a short test lasting one hour, the Core Ultra X9 388H (installed in a Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro) was tested in three games. As ComputerBase explains, Intel’s promise of “performance in a class of its own” was not entirely exaggerated: The Arc B390 positions itself well above the AMD competition in some areas – with one exception.
- In Cyberpunk 2077, the Arc B390 achieved 60 frames per second (fps) in the test system, while the Radeon 890M in a higher-clocked Beelink SER9 mini PC only achieved 33.7 fps – a lead of just under 80 percent.
- The result in Shadow of the Tomb Raider was similarly clear: Here, Intel achieved 103 FPS, while AMD achieved 52 FPS in the same clocked configuration, which means a gain of almost 98 percent.
- The picture is similar in F1 25: Here, the Arc B390 achieved 139 fps, which is around 62 percent faster than the Radeon 890M with 86 fps.
The Arc B390 also achieved more than just respectable results in Notebookcheck: Compared to the previous generation, the new Intel series can deliver between 40 and 50 percent more FPS – and that with slightly less power consumption, as Panther Lake consumes slightly less than 28 watts in this test with 25 watts.
The big but comes at the very top
Nevertheless, the Arc B390 cannot claim the crown among laptop iGPUs – the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with its integrated Radeon 8060S, which has been highly praised for months, is simply too strong.
- Depending on the game, the difference here is between 22 and 54 percent in favor of the AMD variant, which was capped at the same 65 watts for the ComputerBase test as the Arc GPU.
- Naturally, the Arc B390 also lags behind dedicated laptop graphics cards such as the mobile RTX 4070, which was also tested – but Intel does not promise such performance in its presentation slides either.
Rather, the aim is to outperform a dedicated RTX 4050 laptop by around ten percent with lower power consumption. Whether this will succeed should become clear in the coming weeks: the first laptops with Panther Lake CPUs are expected to hit the market at the end of January.
Some other questions that still need to be clarified at this point concern, among other things, the performance of the mobile Intel series with smaller models – such as the Core Ultra 5 338H, which does without two of the Xe³ cores.
At least the first impression is positive: Panther Lake is (as things stand) a “powerhouse,” according to ComputerBase editor-in-chief Jan-Frederik Timm.
