Intel Panther Lake with Arc B390 takes on AMD Ryzen Strix Halo and GeForce RTX 4050 in our first gaming benchmarks
For years, AMD outperformed Intel in terms of power efficiency and graphics performance. That could change with the arrival of Panther Lake, as Intel addressed these former weaknesses with a brand-new CPU architecture, a combination of up to four performance cores and twelve efficiency cores, and the new Arc B390 iGPU with twelve Xe2 cores.
But is the Intel Arc B390 fast enough to end AMD’s dominance in gaming handhelds and to offer reasonable gaming performance in laptops that don’t sport a dedicated graphics card? At CES 2026, we’ve been able to try out a few games on a Lenovo IdeaPad Pro 5i in order to compare the performance of the Intel Core Ultra X9 388H with Arc B390 iGPU against its most notable competitors.
| Cyberpunk 2077 - 1920x1080 Ultra Preset (FSR off) | |
| HP Z2 Mini G1a | |
| Acer Nitro V 16 AI ANV16-42-R860 | |
| HP OmniStudio X 32-c0077ng | |
| Lenovo Pro 5i | |
| Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 6 21QG001VGE | |
| Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 6 21RV0017GE | |
| GMK EVO-T1 | |
| Baldur's Gate 3 - 1920x1080 Ultra Preset AA:T | |
| HP Z2 Mini G1a | |
| Acer Nitro V 16 AI ANV16-42-R860 | |
| HP OmniStudio X 32-c0077ng | |
| Lenovo Pro 5i | |
| Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 6 21QG001VGE | |
| Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 6 21RV0017GE | |
| GMK EVO-T1 | |
| F1 25 - 1920x1080 High Preset AA:T AF:16x | |
| HP Z2 Mini G1a | |
| Lenovo Pro 5i | |
| Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 6 21QG001VGE | |
| GMK EVO-T1 | |
Our comparison shows that the Intel Arc B390 can exceed the gaming performance of the AMD Radeon 890M by more than 80% in some games. Compared to the older Arc 140T, the Arc B390M is nearly 80% faster in certain titles. In Baldur's Gate 3, the iGPU delivers virtually the same performance as the dedicated Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU, but in Cyberpunk 2077 the Nvidia graphics card is 20% faster. AMD’s powerful Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with Radeon 8060S is twice as fast at times, although the chipset is also larger, more expensive and less power efficient.
As usual, actual performance of the Arc B390 is likely to depend heavily on the power limit available to the iGPU and on the speed of the RAM in the respective laptop, since this also serves as VRAM for the iGPU. Will all that said, our initial impressions are promising. Both Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3 are fully playable at 44 to 50 fps at 1080p resolution using the "Ultra" preset, and with XeSS "Quality" including Frame Generation, frame rates well above 160 fps are possible.
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