Digging a little deeper into Intel's Xe3 architecture shows exactly why Panther Lake's iGPU is good: It's basically an Arc A770 graphics card jammed into a mobile chip

Digging a little deeper into Intel’s Xe3 architecture shows exactly why Panther Lake’s iGPU is good: It’s basically an Arc A770 graphics card jammed into a mobile chip | PC Gamer Skip to main content Open menu Close main menu PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES US Edition UK US Canada Australia Subscribe Sign in View Profile Sign out Search Search PC Gamer Games Hardware News Reviews Guides Video Forum More PC Gaming Show Software Movies & TV Codes Coupons Magazine Newsletter Affiliate links Meet the team Community guidelines About PC Gamer PC Gamer Magazine SubscriptionWhy subscribe?Subscribe to the world’s #1 PC gaming magTry a single issue or save on a subscriptionIssues delivered straight to your door or device From$1Subscribe now Don’t miss these Graphics Cards Best graphics cards in 2026: I’ve tested pretty much every AMD and Nvidia GPU of the past 20 years and these are today’s top cards Graphics Cards Asus GeForce RTX 5080 Noctua OC Edition review Memory My testing shows that 16 GB of system memory is still absolutely fine for today’s PC games but there are some caveats to it all Graphics Cards Intel CEO commits to building new GPUs and has hired the engineer who designed some of AMD’s greatest graphics card hits to design them Gaming Laptops Best gaming laptop 2026: I’ve tested the best laptops for gaming of this generation and here are the ones I recommend Processors Best CPU for gaming in 2026: These are the chips I recommend for gaming, productivity, and peace of mind Processors Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 chip gets tested in games and unsurprisingly can’t keep up with Intel’s mighty Panther Lake APU Gaming PCs Best gaming PCs in 2026: these are the rigs and brands I recommend today Gaming PCs Best mini PCs in 2026: The compact computers I love the most Graphics Cards Intel’s Arc B770 gaming graphics card claimed to be dead and the reason is inevitably AI Gaming Laptops Best graphics card for laptops in 2026: the mobile GPUs I’d want in my next gaming laptop Graphics Cards I’ve put Nvidia’s new DLSS 4.5 to the test: Here’s how to enable it yourself and whether you should Processors AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D CPU review Gaming Laptops Best gaming laptop 2026: I’ve tested the best laptops for gaming of this generation and here are the ones I recommend. Processors I did some quick and dirty testing of the Intel Arc B390 iGPU in Intel’s new top-end Core Ultra chip and I’m pretty impressed PopularArc RaidersBest PC gearFalloutHelldivers 2PC Gamer Quizzes! Hardware Graphics Cards Digging a little deeper into Intel’s Xe3 architecture shows exactly why Panther Lake’s iGPU is good: It’s basically an Arc A770 graphics card jammed into a mobile chip Features By Nick Evanson published 14 February 2026 And with better DRAM, it would absolutely fly. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Intel) Jump to: Instruction rate Bandwidth Latencies The good and bad of Xe3 Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter PC Gamer Get the PC Gamer Newsletter Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. 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Subscribe to our newsletter After the early promises of how good Intel’s Xe3 GPU architecture could be, thanks to Intel’s breakdown of the changes implemented to everything, we finally got to test one properly last month in the form of a Panther Lake laptop. And you know what? It is good. Very good, in fact.On paper, that should be a given. Intel’s Arc B390 only sports 1536 shaders, but with 16 MB of L2 cache and a boost clock of 2.5 GHz, that’s way more potent than most integrated GPUs.Leaving aside AMD’s Ryzen AI Max chips (aka Strix Halo), as they’re less an APU with a big iGPU and more of a small GPU with some CPU chips bolted to it, the most appropriate competition for the B390 is AMD’s Radeon 890M and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5050. Related articles Fast, feisty, fabulous: I’ve benchmarked Intel’s new Panther Lake processor and it’s dragging gaming laptop performance out of integrated graphics I did some quick and dirty testing of the Intel Arc B390 iGPU in Intel’s new top-end Core Ultra chip and I’m pretty impressed Intel’s new high-end mobile chip is an impressive game-cruncher, but I don’t think proper gaming laptops should worry just yet I was really curious to see just what the fundamental peak performance of the B390 was like, taking the iGPU out of games and jamming it into some very specific microbenchmarks. However, with neither an 890M nor RTX 5050 to hand, I had to make do with the next best things: the previous generation Radeon 780M and RTX 4050.The key areas I wanted to look at were: peak instruction throughput, cache and VRAM bandwidth, plus latencies for the latter. They’re not the only things that matter for a GPU, but if these are solid enough, then the rest of the chip’s performance should follow suit. (Image credit: Intel)To that end, I utilised Nemez’s GPUPerfTest, a nifty little project that the developer kindly donated to Chips and Cheese’s benchmarking suite, and after compiling the lat