Early Intel Panther Lake iGPU benchmark impresses with 50% faster performance vs Lunar Lake

Intel finally took the wraps off the Panther Lake chips for laptops last week. Among the three Panther Lake SKUs that Intel revealed, the 16-core Panther Lake flagship has the most capable iGPU with 12 Xe3 cores. Intel claims that this iGPU is up to 50% faster than the Arc 140V iGPU of Lunar Lake APUs.

We warned in our launch coverage that, although the new Xe3 Celestial iGPU appears to be capable, you should take first-party performance claims with a grain of salt. It now seems that Intel’s performance reporting for Panther Lake iGPUs might be closer to reality, at least when it comes to synthetic benchmarks.

According to 3DMark Time Spy Graphics results obtained a few days ago by Chinese outlet Laptop Review, the flagship Panther Lake chip, the Core Ultra X9 388H, scores around 6,233 points in 3DMark Time Spy Graphics when paired with 8,533 MT/s memory. The score reportedly jumps to an impressive 6,300 points when the Core Ultra X9 388H is paired with a speedy 9,600 MT/s memory.

Laptop Review reports that a 3DMark Time Spy Graphics score of 6,300 points makes the Xe3 iGPU of the Core Ultra X9 388H just over 50% faster than the Arc 140V of Lunar Lake APUs. This lines up with our benchmark, as the purported Xe3 iGPU of Panther Lake is around 43% ahead of the fastest Arc 140V sample in our database. Moreover, based on the average 3DMark Time Spy Graphics result of the Arc 140V, the Panther Lake iGPU is more than 60% faster.

However, while a 3DMark Time Spy Graphics score of 6,300 is mighty impressive for an energy-efficient chip, it is nowhere near AMD Strix Halo’s Radeon 8060S, which clocked around 11,000 points on average in the same test. This also means that even budget dGPUs like the RTX 4050 remain out of reach.

Lastly, we must mention here that we have no way of confirming the validity of the iGPU performance of Core Ultra X9 388H shared by Laptop Review. So, take the scores with a giant grain of salt.

Buy MSI Claw handheld gaming console with Core Ultra 7 258V on Amazon