Hands on with Panther Lake – Intel ARC B390 Gaming Tested!
Gaming on Panther Lake at CES 2026
Gaming on Panther Lake – Is it good?
At CES 2026, we’ve had the opportunity to play games on the company’s new Core Ultra 3 series “Panther Lake” laptops. Specifically, we’ve tested a Lenovo IdeaPad Pro 5 with Intel’s Core Ultra X9 388H CPU. This CPU features Intel’s new ARC B390 graphics chip, which promises 77% more graphics performance than its last-generation integrated graphics.
What we wanted to find out was simple: are integrated graphics good now? Can Panther Lake deliver a strong gaming experience without a graphics card? Let’s find out!
(No hidden coolers or external GPUs? Nope! Good to go!)
Testing
We have a laptop and a limited time slot. Many people want to try Intel’s new Core Ultra 3 series CPU. That means that our testing is far from exhaustive. That also means that our game selection is limited to what Intel has installed on its test system. We hope to conduct more in-depth game testing with Panther Lake in the future, but for now, here’s what we know.
Panther Lake VS Cyberpunk 2077
Given our limited testing time, we’ve been forced to settle for built-in benchmarks for our game testing. We’ve also had to be quick, so we have not been able to test all game settings or graphical presets.
To start off, we thought we would give Panther Lake a challenge. 1080p at Ultra RT settings. It’s not path tracing, but Cyberpunk 2077 is an uber-demanding game when ray tracing is enabled. To say the least, we were impressed with what Intel delivered with its integrated graphics solution. An average framerate of 37.91 FPS at native 1080p. Set XeSS to “Balanced” with Frame Generation enabled (2x frame generation), and the game averages 81 FPS.
If we move to the game’s Ultra preset (without ray tracing), the game runs at 73.08 FPS with XeSS upscaling enabled. With Frame Generation (2x), the game runs at over 100 FPS in its benchmark. This is stellar performance from an integrated graphics chip. B390 is undoubtedly a gaming-ready graphics chip.
