Intel's new Arc B390 GPU on Panther Lake CPUs: beats AMD and Qualcomm, up to 77% faster gaming

Intel has launched its new Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" CPUs at CES 2026, packed with its heavily upgraded Arc B390 integrated GPU that provides RTX 4050 levels of gaming performance.

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The new Arc B390 inside of the new Panther Lake CPUs is providing up to 77% more gaming performance over the integrated GPU inside of the Core Ultra 9 288V "Lunar Lake" CPU, and up to 53% faster AI versus the 288V.

The first foray for Intel's new GPU architecture is the Arc B390 inside Panther Lake, with the flagship Arc B390 providing some rather kick ass performance over its predecessors, and more importantly, its competitors.

• Read more: Intel Core Ultra Series 3 CPUs launched at CES 2026, Panther Lake powers next-gen laptops

Intel is using 12 Xe3 GPU cores on its flagship Arc B390 GPU in the higher-end tiers of Panther Lake CPUs, which is a 50% upgrade in GPU cores over the Arc 140V on Lunar Lake. Intel is promising up to 77% more performance in graphics and up to 76% more performance over the Xe+ based Arc 140T on Arrow Lake. That's with 2x upscaling and 1080p.

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In native performance, the flagship Core Ultra X9 388H processor with the full Arc B390 GPU is compared against the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" APU with the Radeon 390M, with the new Panther Lake CPU reigning supreme with an 82% performance increase.

That's at native 1080p with the Core Ultra Series 3 processor sitting at just 45W, compared to the Strix Point APU with 53W.

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Intel takes a huge swipe at Qualcomm with its new Arc B390 GPU on Panther Lake, comparing it to the Snapdragon X Elite 84-100 processor with a 50W sustained TDP, with the Arc B390 absolutely thrashing it with a gigantic 2.6x performance increase.

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Intel even compares its new integrated GPU on its new Panther Lake laptop CPU with the discrete version of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4050, with the Arc B390 sharing the same sustained 45W TDP, matching and sometimes beating the RTX 4050 Laptop GPU in a bunch of games. Overall, the Arc B390 is 10% faster on average than the RTX 4050 Laptop GPU.

It wouldn't be a new GPU launch with some rather successful performance gains without the company showing off some Frame-Gen and Multi-Frame Generation performance numbers, with the Arc B390 beating the Radeon 890M and RTX 4050 Laptop GPU in games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Battlefield 6.

Overall, it's fantastic to see this great technology and success for Intel and its GPU division, as its new Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" CPUs seem to be everything the company has needed -- and been working hard towards -- for years now. I'm looking forward to TweakTown getting the new Panther Lake CPUs to put them under some testing (and lots of playing).

There's a lot going on here with the release of the Core Ultra Series 3 processors, as they're the first fabbed on the new Intel 18A process node, have huge CPU and GPU performance increases, new technologies, and so much more under the hood.