Intel just pulled back the curtain on Lunar Lake during its global launch event for Core Ultra Series 2 processors, and the gaming story looks remarkable. Intel is claiming it now has the best built-in graphics in the industry, full stop. Faster than Qualcomm’s best, and faster than AMD’s best.
Intel shared that its latest Intel Arc graphics — which use Xe2 architecture — boast a 30% per-core performance lift over the last generation. Amazingly, Intel Senior VP Jim Johnson says the company saw a 50% generation-over-generation boost in games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Hogwarts Legacy during internal testing.
To illustrate the leadership story, Johnson displayed a massive chart showing average FPS measured across 50 games. All of the games were tested at 1080p with medium quality settings. The processors tested:
- Intel Core Ultra 9 288V (with Intel Arc 140V graphics)
- AMD Ryzen HX 700 (with Radeon 890M graphics)
- Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E-84-100 (with Adreno X1-85 graphics)
The chart shows a 16% overall performance win against AMD’s Ryzen HX 370, with AMD only snagging a handful of victories.
But Intel’s real target in this matchup is of course ARM, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite. After all, Qualcomm was first to market with Copilot+ PCs and gained a ton of mindshare with its marathon battery life story. But ARM does have an Achilles heel on Windows, and that’s game compatibility.
“[…] 68% faster than Qualcomm,” Johnson said, “and that was difficult to measure, because 23 of the games didn’t run on Qualcomm’s processor.”
Ouch.
Later in the presentation, Intel took aim at both Qualcomm and AMD’s power efficiency. It showed side-by-side footage of Dota 2 running at roughly the same framerates, but Lunar Lake was using 30% less power. Against Qualcomm, it was consuming only half the power.
We can never take internal testing at face value, though. Though it’s a long list of games — many of them popular or graphically demanding — the titles were certainly cherry picked to support whatever narrative Intel wanted to promote. Data can be amazingly malleable in that regard.
But I suspect that even when real-world testing begins later this month, we’re going to see the core of Intel’s gaming leadership narrative shake out to be true.
Johnson concluded by saying that Lunar Lake “brings 1080p gaming to thin and light systems with great framerates and really nice frame times.” And really, that’s been the dream for more than a decade: that integrated graphics could someday deliver 1080p/60fps gaming without needing to splurge for a dedicated graphics card.
We’re sprinting ever closer to that dream.
