Intel's new gaming CPU wipes the floor with AMD, with up to 78% higher performance in Cyberpunk 2077

How the tables have turned… AMD, once the king of delivering the most powerful integrated graphics on its CPUs, has just had its derrière delivered to it by long-time rival Intel and its just-launched range of laptop chips. The Intel Core Ultra 300 series - based on the Panther Lake architecture - includes a GPU that's 50% faster than Intel's previous Core Ultra 200 Arrow Lake chips and is far, far faster than AMD's current standard laptop chips, its Ryzen AI 300 range.

Intel itself claims the new Arc B390 GPU inside its top-tier Panther Lake chips is 73% faster than the Radeon 890M used in the Ryzen AI 300 series, but new public testing has shown it can even surpass that, delivering 78% higher performance in Cyberpunk 2077 and consistently high frame rates in other games, too. Based on these early tests, these chips could soon completely change the face of our best gaming laptop guide and the overall laptop performance landscape.

The Intel Core Ultra 300 Panther Lake launch is a significant one for Intel for many reasons, as it combines many of the power-saving advances it made with its Lunar Lake chips with the tiled design and scalable performance of Arrow Lake, all while using a new Intel 18A manufacturing process. You can read more about those details in our Intel Panther Lake guide.

However, what really stands out is just how powerful the new integrated GPU is in these chips. Rumors had long pointed to this GPU being 50% faster than that in the company's current-gen Arrow Lake laptop chips - such as you can read about in our Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 review - but it's only now we're seeing those results in real-world tests.

The folks over at Club386 got hands-on with a new Lenovo laptop running the Intel Core Ultra X9 388H while also having access to an Asus Vivobook S running the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 - AMD's equivalent current-gen flagship. Firing up a handful of game tests, the results quickly became clear, with Intel's new flagship absolutely trouncing the AMD machine.

In Cyberpunk 2077, the Intel chip delivers 50fps average with solid 43fps 1% lows while running at 1080p using the high-quality preset. Meanwhile, the AMD chip could only manage 28fps average with 22fps 1% lows. Both results are still impressive compared to where standard integrated graphics for laptops were just a few years ago, but the leap ahead Intel has achieved here is remarkable.

What's more, Panther Lake supports XeSS upscaling and multi-frame generation, allowing this machine to hit 198fps average, albeit with three 'fake frames' for every fully rendered frame. The best the AMD machine could manage was enabling upscaling to hit 38fps average.

The 388H can even run the game with ray tracing. Using the low-quality ray tracing preset, it hit 40fps average, while at medium quality it struggled to 25fps average. The AMD chip, though? It could only muster 18fps average at low quality.

This impressive performance isn't just limited to Cyberpunk 2077, with Doom: The Dark Ages hitting 39fps at low quality - remember, this is a game that forces on some degree of ray tracing. Club386 didn't test the AMD system for comparison, but it's still impressive that the Intel chip can hit these numbers. Similarly, testing F1 25, the Core Ultra 388H could hit 93fps average, although the 1% lows were terrible, at just 11fps.

All told, we're now in a situation where you can pick up a quite conventional laptop running one of the latest Intel Core Ultra 300 chips and comfortably game on it. That was unheard of just a few years ago.

There are a couple of caveats to note. First off, you'll need to make sure the system you're picking up has the most powerful GPU, denoted by the model name having an X in it - Intel Core Ultra X9 388H rather than Core Ultra 9 386H, for instance - and these will come at a premium. What's more, while AMD's just-announced Ryzen AI 400 series doesn't include a faster GPU than its current Ryzen AI 300 series (the series tested above), these also aren't AMD's flagship gaming laptop CPUs.

Instead, AMD has its Ryzen AI Max series of chips - based on the Strix Halo architecture - that offer significantly higher performance than its standard Ryzen AI 300/400 chips. In my tests on the Asus ROG Flow Z13 (2025), using the second-fastest Strix Halo chip, the Ryzen AI Max 390, this very compact gaming tablet could hit 50fps in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p with high-quality settings, with the fastest Strix Halo configuration having 25% more GPU power than this.

These Strix Halo chips have tended to be very expensive, but AMD just launched two new Strix Halo models that offer the same super-powerful GPU as the previous flagship Strix Halo chip, but with far fewer CPU cores, which is hoped will make them a lot cheaper. As I wrote about in that piece linked above, this could make these new Strix Halo chips absolutely incredible for a new wave of powerful gaming laptops that don't need a whole extra separate laptop GPU.

Ultimately, what isn't without doubt is that 2026 is going to be an absolutely revolutionary year for gaming laptops, based on what we've seen so far. Oh, and did we mention that several of these CPUs could find their way into gaming handhelds, too?