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I’ve been testing and reviewing laptops for more than half a decade now here at TechRadar, and I’ve said in more ultrabook reviews than I could count that gaming isn’t a consideration. So much so that we don’t even really do official gaming benchmarks on iGPUs for our reviews because there really wasn’t any point.
I got to play around with the Intel Core Ultra series 3 processors last Summer, back when they were known as Intel Panther Lake, and I came away very impressed by the performance of the 12 Xe core iGPU.
I still wasn’t prepared, however, for what Intel has been cooking up in its fabs, and now that the Arc B390 is official as of this week, I’ve had a chance to give its gaming performance a closer look – and I love what I see.
High FPS 1080p gaming without a discrete GPU is now a reality
When I first played Painkiller 3 on Intel Panther Lake back in 2025, the controls were smooth, and the visuals looked fantastic for a game playing on a thin and light laptop. But this was just one game, and it was a game built and optimized for fast-paced first-person combat, so it wasn’t the most visually demanding of games I could have played.
Here at CES 2026, however, Intel let me test out more resource-intensive games like Dying Light: The Beast and Battlefield 6, and without question, the Arc B390 iGPU in the Intel Core Ultra series 3 chips has the juice.
With base rendered framerates of 45-50 fps for Battlefield 6 and 60-70 fps for Dying Light: The Beast in my time with the two games (running at 1080p on High Quality settings without RT, and Intel XeSS 3 set to Balanced), the raw performance of the iGPU is unmatched for a thin and light laptop.
Add in 4x MFG, and I was seeing 160-170 fps in Dying Light: The Beast and as high as 205 fps in Battlefield 6. And with such high rendered framerates to work from, perceived latency was effectively non-existent in most of the games I tried.
The outlier was Marvel Rivals, unfortunately, at least at the high-quality settings that the demo I played was using. But if you were willing to make a couple of graphics sacrifices (or you’re not a serious esports player in ranked matches and you’re just looking to have fun), the performance on offer provides a great experience for most people.
What’s more, games that already support Intel XeSS 2 can be made to support Intel XeSS 3 with MFG through the Intel Graphics app override, so a lot of games will be able to support the kinds of triple-digit framerates out of the gate, with more to come in the weeks and months ahead.
The Intel Arc B390 alone makes the Intel Core Ultra series 3 the laptop and mainstream desktop chip to beat in 2026
Having seen the AMD Radeon 890M, Apple M5, and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite in practice, an Intel Core Ultra series 3 with B390 iGPU is going to be the chip I recommend to anyone looking to buy a new laptop, mini PC, or AIO PC in 2026, purely on the power of the Arc B390.
I haven’t seen the GPU performance on the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite or Elite Extreme chips yet, so I’ll reserve a definitive judgment on those chips until I do.
But unless Qualcomm has cooked up the computing surprise of the century and hasn’t bragged about it to anyone yet, I expect those chips to seriously improve on the Snapdragon X Elite’s GPU performance but still fall well short of consideration here, given how the previous-gen flagship chip’s GPU starts off being a complete non-factor when it comes to gaming. I expect the X2 Elite Extreme to be competitive with Apple’s M5 or a lower-tier Radeon 800-series iGPU, but that’s about it.
All that said, it’s important to note that the Arc B390 is the 12 Xe core iGPU for the Core Ultra series 3, so the 8 Xe core iGPU—which hasn’t been named yet, but I can guess will likely be the Arc B370, given it would be the follow up to the Arc A370M from the last generation—is still something of a mystery and so I can’t speak to how that iGPU stacks up against its rivals yet. As such, the lower-end Core Ultra 5 300-series chips might not be all that much better than their AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm counterparts. Time will tell.
But for the Arc B390, there’s nothing I’ve seen from any of Intel’s competition that comes close to its gaming performance in a thin and light form factor. It’s simply astounding that I’m able to play some of these games at frame rates this high and have them look this good on a laptop or mini PC so small.
The Arc B390 won’t ever be able to replace the best gaming laptops on the market with modern discrete GPUs, but for the first time, high-quality PC gaming in full HD on a tiny 14-inch ultrabook isn’t just possible, it’s a reality with the B390 iGPU, and it honestly makes it hard to justify buying a premium thin and light laptop without one in 2026.
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John.Loeffler@futurenet.com (John Loeffler)
