Intel Panther Lake can now use 93% of RAM as graphics memory

Intel has released a driver update to version 32.0.101.8804 for Intel Arc Pro graphics cards and iGPUs. The update primarily improves dynamic memory allocation for the Intel Arc Pro B370 and Intel Arc Pro B390. According to Intel, on a system with 64 GB of RAM, the new driver makes it possible to allocate up to 59.5 GB, or 93 percent of the RAM, to the iGPU.

Combined with other improvements in the new driver, this is expected to result in noticeably better performance in select applications. Intel is particularly highlighting a 15 percent performance boost for the Intel Arc Pro B390 in Blender, as well as a 5 percent performance improvement for older iGPUs. The previous driver version was limited to allocating 87 percent of the total available RAM to graphics memory. The allocation between system memory and graphics memory is handled dynamically and automatically, as before, unlike with AMD Ryzen Strix Halo, where users can manually split the memory into two pools.

Intel’s approach is significantly more flexible. However, compared to dedicated graphics cards, the LPDDR5X-8,533 system memory that Panther Lake can utilize is considerably slower. On paper, the system memory achieves a memory bandwidth of 68.26 GB/s, whereas, for example, the graphics memory of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 laptop GPU reaches 384 GB/s, and the Apple M5 Max reaches 614 GB/s. For applications where memory bandwidth takes priority over sheer capacity, Intel iGPUs are therefore still not the best choice.