Intel’s “Panther Lake” chips, built on the 18A node, debuted at CES 2026, featuring Arc B390 integrated graphics. This launch shows that Intel is now commited to delivering some of the best-in-class iGPU performance. Digital Foundry has reported impressive performance claims from Intel. In Cyberpunk 2077, at 1080p resolution with the game set to “Ultra” and with ray-traced shadows and reflections enabled, Intel’s top-tier Core Ultra X9 388H SKU achieves 28 FPS. While this may not seem remarkable at first glance, under the same settings, AMD’s “Strix Point” Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with Radeon 890M graphics manages only 14 FPS. This suggests that the “Panther Lake” chip performs twice as fast in early game results. In Intel’s own testing, the “Panther Lake” chip is 73% faster with upscaling technologies and 82% faster at native resolution compared to AMD’s “Strix Point,” indicating an average across multiple titles. This also means there are instances where the Arc B390 outputs 100% more frames compared to the Radeon 890M.
Regarding desktop GPU performance, Intel is now comparable to the AMD Radeon RX 6600 discrete GPU, which scored 27 FPS in the same Cyberpunk 2077 game settings. Intel is collaborating with developers to integrate its latest XeSS3 multi-frame generation upscaling technology into numerous titles from the start. Cyberpunk 2077 is supported from day one, resulting in about a 3x increase in frame rates compared to XeSS2. In comparison to NVIDIA, Intel also claims to surpass NVIDIA’s DLSS with the RTX 4050, particularly since XeSS3 supports multi-frame generation, which the RTX 4050 does not.