Did Intel Finally Get It Right? ⭐

Intel’s Panther Lake introduction at CES was impressive. But so was its Lunar Lake introduction 18 months ago, and we all know how that turned out. Did Intel finally get it right, or is Panther Lake just a case of two steps forward, one step sideways?

Apologies for ruining the premise of this article’s title, but it’s too early to say with any certainty. Those who attended CES were able to interact with apps and games on Panther Lake-based PCs and observe or run benchmarks. But that was while those PCs were plugged into power, and one of the big issues with Lunar Lake is that performance drops off a cliff when the system is on battery.

The caveat

As for me, I’ve been using a Panther Lake-based laptop, the HP OmniBook Ultra, and I am now using it full time ahead of my full review. Based solely on the games I’ve played so far—mostly Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, but also Silent Hill f and Battlefield 6—Intel’s GPU performance gain claims appear to have some merit, though there’s an important asterisk to that we need to discuss.

The bigger deal to me, and this is one that has plagued Intel CPUs dating back to the 11th or 12th generation Intel Core chips, was particularly problematic with Lunar Lake. And that’s reliability, a monster that raises its ugly head in all kinds of ways, but most obviously when you just open the lid, spin the wheel, and see which experience you get. It’s all over the map, and that’s been true of this one Panther Lake laptop too.

And that’s yet another caveat: I only have a single Panther Lake laptop made by a single PC maker and it may or may not be representative of what this chipset is like now or three, six, or 12 months in the future. I need, we all need, more evidence, more experience, and a wider range of PCs before we can issue any ruling.

What Intel announced

That last bit, too, is important. Now that I’ve watched the full Intel press conference at which it announced Panther Lake, or the Core Ultra Series 3 series of chips, I can see that Intel will be all over the map on Panther Lake chip configurations, with multiple SKUs, or models, each with different core configurations and other differences. Panther Lake isn’t one thing, it’s a big family of products, and there will be more in the future, as Intel previewed that it’s bringing a Panther Lake variant to gaming handheld PCs too.

So, yes, Intel offered a confident outlook for this generation of chips at the introduction. But, as a reminder, it offered a nearly identically confident outlook at its Lunar Lake introduction, and that turned out to be all smoke and mirrors. And I have to just comment on Intel as a company.

Intel’s humbling in recent years is overdue and well-deserved. And I can’t agree with those who think it somehow deserves to survive, let alone thrive, given the market abuses it engaged in to extend and maintain its dominance over so many years. We need fewer companies like the old Intel in our industry, not more of the same. Whether the “new” Intel is really a different company is debatable and unknown, but to me, I see a company running more on inertia than anything else. It’s like the Kleenex of the PC CPU business, and most people forget or don’t know there are other choices. And that those other choices, AMD and Qualcomm, have been making much better chips than Intel recently. AMD for several years, for which it doesn’t get enough credit. And Qualcomm only recently, though they are objectively superior in all the ways that matter.

So there’s that. But this battle for the soul of our PCs is important. And if Intel can somehow engineer a miracle turnaround and deliver PC chips that offer better or at least solid performance, efficiency, and reliability, I won’t ignore it, and neither should anyone else considering a new PC. Ultimately, all I want is for the PC to be as good as it can be as a platform. And that requires high quality hardware, not just high quality software.

What is Panther Lake?

Anyway, Panther Lake.

Intel Core Ultra Series 3 is, as its name suggests, the third generation of a family of premium PC processors. It succeeds the original Core Ultra series (Meteor Lake) and Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake). All three generations share a few commonalities, but to me as an end user, the biggest is that each represents a significant and noticeable graphics performance increase over its predecessors.

Aside from basic reliability, this is a big focus for me. And that’s because even mainstream premium business and consumer laptops with these chipsets can play modern AAA videogames at acceptable quality levels and frame rates. Indeed, Meteor Lake was such a leap forward when it first shipped two years ago that I was inspired to write A Few Thoughts on Portable PC Gaming (Premium) back in mid-2024.

But it has gotten even better with Lunar Lake and now Panther Lake. Intel claimed that the integrated GPU in Lunar Lake offered a 30 percent average performance improvement in games compared to Meteor Lake. And with Panther Lake, it now claims “up to 77 percent” better performance over Lunar Lake. Those two claims are not measuring the same thing, which should make anyone suspicious, but whatever the average gain is this time around, it’s clearly double-digits.

Panther Lake graphics

The problem is that there are different Panther Lake chips. Some come with the latest generation Arc B-series graphics responsible for the above claim, and some do not. But even within the subset of chips that do, there are different graphics chiplets. The Core Ultra 5 338H, for example, comes with an Arc B370 integrated GPU. And the Core Ultra X9 388H that’s in the HP review unit comes with a higher-end Arc B390 GPU that has 12 Xe cores, compared to 10 for the other, and 122 peak TOPS vs. 98 for the other. This is, importantly, the highest-end Panther Lake chip that’s currently available. So what I’m seeing, what people benchmarking these PCs at CES saw, is best case.

But that’s not either of the caveats I referenced earlier.

I haven’t fully tested games on battery power vs. plugged in, but I’ve done a bit of the former, just to see. So that’s one potential area of concern, albeit a small one since anyone playing demanding games will plug into power. I always do, for sure.

If you watch the Core Ultra Series 3 launch recording, a few things stand out. Intel’s Jim Johnson says that the new GPU is “arguably the biggest update” in Panther Lake. Dan Rogers starts off the GPU segment with a nicely honest appraisal of Intel’s lackluster history with GPUs until Arc. He also notes that the latest Arc graphics, as hinted above, come only on two tiers of H-series Panther Lake processors; left unsaid is that most Panther Lake chips do not include these graphics capabilities. (And despite the content of the talk, Arc B390 graphics are only available on the top three models.)

The Arc B390 GPU features 12 Xe cores, which is 50 percent more than its predecessor in Lunar Lake. 16 MB of cache, which is double its predecessor. 96 XMX accelerators, which are responsible for the 122 GPU TOPS noted above. I like that Intel compared this chip, playing games, to AMD HX 370, its current top-of-the-line chip. Rogers said that the B390 was 73 percent faster in gaming than the latest AMD and up to 2X faster in select titles. (The chart he displays showed 62 FPS on AMD and 85 FPS for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on Panther Lake/B390.)

To the caveat. Rogers notes that the numbers Intel was touting that day were, in effect, temporary and that things would only get better. The performance it discussed then was “traditional raster performance with AI upscaling.” The Panther Lake/B390 chips have a modern rendering pipeline, XeSS3, that offers better lighting and other visual improvements with ray tracing, sharper visuals, and “the ultimate in smoothness with AI-generated frames.”

The Arc graphics in (select) Panther Lake chips, he said, include the first-ever integrated graphics to support AI-based multi-frame generation. This is capable of delivering 3 AI-generated frames for every one rendered frame. In other words, this is basically Super Resolution, a method by which you can run a game at a lower resolution but have the output enhanced to such a degree that it looks to be of much higher quality while running at a higher perceived frame rate. This is what AutoSR does for games running on Snapdragon X.

This will freak out some people, I guess, since AI just has that knee-jerk reaction for some reason. But I will need to see it before I can even pretend to judge it. I suspect it will look great for the most part, and that some titles will need some fine-tuning. In short, I’m OK with this. But Intel’s claims of triple digit frame rates (a claimed 120 FPS, three times faster than AMD) in Battlefield 6 are based on a driver that utilizes AI-based multi-frame rendering.

Battlefield maker EA doesn’t seem fazed by this. And I feel like this is a good example of the difference between benchmarks and real-world experience. As long as the game looks and runs great, who cares what the literal resolution and frame rates are?

My early experiences

I viewed the Intel presentation after I wrote about the HP OmniBook Ultra. And in that write-up, I noted that I was seeing over 80 FPS at native resolution, and that I had seen some triple-digit scores previously. Either way, the game had never looked better on integrated graphics.

And … hm.

I was already curious why I had seen such different FPS measures over a few weeks of time, but this talk of AI-generated frames got me wondering. What was I really seeing? And I so I looked at it again. There will be more, but what I’m seeing is odd.

When I discuss frame rates in Call of Duty or other games, what I’m looking at is a live counter, usually via the Game Bar. But this game also has a benchmarking tool. And running that, I can see that while the display resolution is indeed 2880 x 1800, the render resolution is just 960 x 608 using Intel XeSS upscaling and sharpening. Frame generation is off—I assume I don’t have an updated driver—and the average frame rate is just 46 FPS.

Running on battery, I somehow saw better numbers: 75 FPS on average, which is close to the 80 FPS I observed, but with the same render resolution, scaling and sharpening. Curious.

The thing is, the graphics quality and performance are both incredible, either way.

I have more to do. I’ll be playing more games, of course, including Battlefield 6. You know, in the interests of science. And looking for new drivers as well. But there are other things that could impact the quality and performance of games. For example, HP bundles its OMEN Gaming Hub software on this laptop, and an Intel Graphics app, and each is likely doing some kind of optimization too. . I wonder if these things “fight” each other or whatever. I’ll try to find out.