After testing over a dozen Radeon 890M laptops, AMD's lead against Intel in the integrated graphics race is narrowing

AMD had been enjoying strong leads against Intel since the launch of the Radeon 680M in 2022. At that time, the Iris Xe 96 EUs was the best and most common integrated solution in Intel's arsenal and yet it was lagging behind the Radeon 680M by as much as 30 to 50 percent. The delta grew marginally wider in AMD's favor once the Radeon 780M became available.

When Intel launched the successor to the Iris Xe 96 EUs with Arc 8, they managed to narrow the performance gap against AMD by a significant margin. The catch, however, was that Arc 8 was only available on more demanding Core H-series laptops which were not as common as laptops running on Core U-series or Ryzen U-series options.

The latest generation of integrated graphics from Intel includes the Arc 130V, 140V, and 140T. The V-series directly addresses the issue above as you no longer need to buy a Core H-series laptop to get the newest iGPU from Intel while still managing to offer slightly faster performance than the Arc 8 by 10 to 15 percent on average according to 3DMark. The boost in both raw performance and performance-per-watt this generation has made the integrated Intel solution competitive against AMD's best — a situation that hasn't happened in years.

Even so, the power-hungry Radeon 890M PC still outperforms the average Arc 140V in most tested games by about 10 percent. Certain titles like Tiny Tina's Wonderlands see an even wider gap of 20 percent while other titles like Cyberpunk 2077 can be a stalemate between the two competing GPUs before adjusting for any upscaling technologies. The current trajectory is nonetheless looking respectable for Intel if they can keep up the generational gains.