Intel's Arc G3 Extreme is often more than 50 % faster than AMD's Ryzen Z2 Extreme at 35 Watts

The new Arc G3 Extreme is Intel's first dedicated processor for gaming handhelds. It is a slightly slimmed-down Panther Lake processor (only two fast Performance cores) in combination with the powerful Arc B390 iGPU. The latter is also slightly slower compared to the version of regular laptop chips (maximum clock 2300 vs. 2500 MHz), but the gaming performance is still excellent as we have already seen in our comprehensive review of the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+.

Last year, we saw that Intel based handhelds with Lunar Lake chips already closed the gap to AMD's Ryzen Z2 Extreme, and the new Arc G3 Extreme easily surpasses the AMD chip in terms of gaming performance. To see the real performance advantage, we compared benchmark results with both chips running in the fastest power profile. Both the Arc G3 Extreme in the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ as well as the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme in the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X can maintain 35 Watts (even though the Ally only manages this attached to the power adapter). We compare the raw gaming performance without any upscaling or frame generation.