Since laptop buyers had to make compromises, the one that no one questioned was this: if you want to game, you carry the heavier machine. The integrated graphics were fine for everything else – browsing, video calling, the occasional older title – but the moment you asked one to run a proper AAA game at a playable frame rate, it simply wasn’t up to the task. That was the deal and the industry moved forward accordingly.
Intel’s Core Ultra series, codenamed Panther Lake, is the first serious attempt to change that.
What is the Intel Core Ultra Series 3?
Announced at CES 2026, the Core Ultra Series 3 is Intel’s latest generation of mobile processors and the first built on its internal 18A process node, a significant manufacturing milestone that delivers real gains in both performance and power efficiency. The line runs from the Core Ultra 5 to the flagship Core Ultra X9 388H, designed to cover everything from everyday ultrabooks to high-performance business machines.
Under the hood, the architecture uses Intel’s hybrid core approach: next-generation performance cores (P-cores) for agile and responsive tasks; Efficient cores (E-cores) for multitasking and parallelism; and low power consumption (LPE) cores that handle lighter workloads without touching the battery unnecessarily. The high-end chips have up to 16 cores in total and the new NPU 5 architecture delivers up to 50 TOPS of AI performance, making every chip in the line fully compatible with Copilot+ from day one.
But the CPU and NPU upgrades, as impressive as they are, aren’t the reason people are paying attention to the Intel Core Ultra Series 3. The GPU is.
Arc B390: an iGPU that really plays
The Core Ultra X7 and X9 variants ship with Intel Arc B390, an integrated GPU based on the new Xe3 architecture with up to 12 Xe3 cores. The previous generation Arc 140V in Lunar Lake had 8 Xe cores, so this is a 50% increase in core count from the start. Intel claims up to 77% better gaming performance than its predecessor, thanks to architectural improvements
Competitive comparisons are where it gets really interesting. With a sustained TDP of 45W from the full CPU package, the Arc B390 is around 10% faster than NVIDIA’s RTX 4050 laptop when the GPU alone draws 60W. The RTX 4050 isn’t a relic: it’s a discrete GPU currently included in dedicated gaming laptops. Against AMD’s Radeon 890M with the same power envelope, the gap is even larger: the B390 gains about 80% in native 1080p games.
We tested it ourselves on the Asus ExpertBook Ultra, one of the first laptops to ship with the Core Ultra X7 358H and its full 12-core Arc B390. In 3D Mark, it scored 6,713 in Time Spy and 12,838 in Fire Strike, ahead of similarly specced machines across the board. In real games, I tested it at medium 1080p settings without upscaling, it recorded 63fps in Horizon Zero Dawn, 59fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and 37fps in Black Myth: Wukong with XeSS enabled. The ExpertBook Ultra that does all this weighs less than 1kg and is 10.9mm thick. That combination simply didn’t exist before.
Then there’s XeSS 3, which goes even further. Intel’s AI-powered upscaling combines super resolution with multi-frame generation, a technology that inserts up to four AI-generated frames between each rendered frame. Arc B390 is currently the only integrated GPU in the world that supports Multi-Frame generation. Activate it in Assassin’s Creed Shadows and the frame rate goes up to about 100 fps. Cyberpunk produces even similar results. There are some caveats – frame generation works better at higher refresh rates and can show minor artifacts in fast-moving sequences – but the ceiling it creates for a chip without a discrete GPU is something the industry hasn’t seen before.
It’s worth noting that the full Arc B390 with 12 Xe3 cores is specific to the X-series chips: Core Ultra X7 and X9. The Core Ultra 5 338H gets the Arc B370 with 10 Xe3 cores, which is still a powerful GPU for its class. Other variants of the standard Core Ultra 5 and Core Ultra 7 come with Intel Graphics, a more conventional integrated solution. If gaming is the priority, the Series X designation is what you’re looking for on the spec sheet.
The bigger picture
Intel Core Ultra Series 3 is not just a generational increase in GPUs. It’s the first time that integrated graphics have been truly competitive with entry-level discrete GPUs in real gaming workloads, and when you factor in XeSS 3 framerates, the gap closes even more.
In essence, the Intel Core Ultra Now you can play AAA games on the go for many hours, or work and study on the same device for a few days without needing to carry a laptop.
Whether that’s enough to make you reconsider skipping a discrete GPU on your next laptop purchase depends on what you game and how picky you are about your setup, but it’s worth having the conversation now. A year ago it wasn’t.
