When I filed into Intel’s auditorium to watch its launch presentation for the latest generation of its chipsetsI wasn’t expecting to come away with gaming as my biggest point of interest, but when that section of the keynote came around it really did make a big impression.
I test a lot of gaming laptops here at T3 (in fact, I’ve got a great buyer’s guide for the very best gaming laptops on the market), so I know a thing or two about what people want from their laptops, performance-wise. Still, the vast majority of gaming hardware I’ve tested has one thing in common – discrete graphics cards.
It’s worth skipping straight to the example Intel supplied during its keynote: Battlefield 6. Intel and the shooter’s publisher EA have apparently been working together for well over a year to make the title play nice with the latest Panther Lake SoCs. The result is that on the highest-spec chipset, the game can run at a staggeringly impressive 58fps on average, using its highest Overkill visual settings at 1080p.
The key innovation here is the new third-generation XeSS system, Intel’s super sampling feature, which now boasts frame-generation. This inserts AI-generated frames into your gameplay, and the new version can go up to 4X (three AI frames for every one native frame).
I’ve repeatedly crowed about how impressive Nvidia’s frame generation tech can be on a laptop screen, and Intel’s is no less transformative in the right circumstances. The fact that you can now play Battlefield 6 smoothly on high settings on integrated graphcis really could mark a watershed moment.
(Image credit: Future)
In the past year, there’s been plenty of discussion (some openly, some behind closed doors) about when integrated graphics might start to really compete on performance with dedicated laptop GPUs, and Panther Lake is showing all the signs of bringing that moment closer.
Sure, if you want the best performance possible, or if you’re a pixel-peeper who can see the difference between raw fps and frame-generated settings, then you’re still safe in the knowledge that 2026 laptops with proper GPUs are superior. But, for the average consumer, the fact that they can play genuinely new releases without needing a gaming laptop is frankly massive.
The more games Intel can sign up for compatibility with its latest Arc graphics (and it should have over 100 at launch), the more impressive its capabilities will look, and the direction of travel is absolutely the right one.
All in all, though, it makes it feel like there’s a fairly existential moment coming for the gaming laptop market. If an affordable ultrabook that’s primarily aimed at productivity can also pack in a SoC with this sort of gaming power, it makes it harder than ever to sell people on a chunkier or more expensive machine just for gaming.
Of course, in the next few weeks we’ll see a whole host of gaming laptops with these Intel chipsets and discrete cards – and I can’t wait to test them. Perhaps, for now, this just means that gaming laptops will become drastically more usable for gaming while unplugged.
In the long run, though, I’m fascinated to see where this all takes us – and how companies like MSI, Asus, Dell and others adapt as the chipset landscape shifts.