I did some quick and dirty testing of the Intel Arc B390 iGPU in Intel's new top-end Core Ultra chip and I'm pretty impressed
It's still an iGPU, though. Adjust your expectations accordingly.
(Image credit: Future)
It'll be a little while yet before we get the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 mobile chips on our test bench. However, as I'm on the ground at CES 2026, Intel gave me a chance earlier today to put the Arc B390 iGPU through its paces in a brief benchmarking session. I have to say, its performance was pretty impressive—for an integrated graphics solution, at the very least.
Due to my packed CES schedule (my fault entirely), I had less than an hour to quickly run some benchmarks and futz around in the odd game. Still, I'm enough of an old hand to know exactly what game I was benching first—Cyberpunk 2077, of course.
No, this is an iGPU, and expectations should be tempered—Intel says the Arc B390 is around 10% faster on average than an Nvidia RTX 4050, and that's not exactly a lightning-fast graphics card.
(Image credit: Future)
A perfectly playable average of 53 fps. Now, I'm fully aware that this figure is unlikely to set anyone's world on fire. That being said, for an iGPU with no upscaling or frame generation help, it's still downright impressive. The machine I was testing it on felt like about as default a notebook as you could possible buy, so it was slightly surreal to see it deliver such a result with very little fanfare.
In reality, anyone gaming on a GPU-less portable machine will want to make use of upscaling, so I ran the bench again with XeSS set to Quality, resulting in a 74 fps average result. I'd say that was downright smooth, and I'd happily play Cyberpunk 2077 once more at this sort of image quality and frame rate without complaint.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
If I was really pushed, though, I'd quite like some ray tracing. With a gulp, I changed the preset to Ray Tracing: Ultra (hey, why not), enabled frame generation, set XeSS to Auto, consulted with the gods, and set the benchmark off once more.
(Image credit: Future)
70.31 fps. Now, given that 2x frame generation is involved, latency would almost certainly rear its ugly head pretty quickly while gaming at these sort of settings, given the lowness of the base frame rate—and as the game was a blank slate with no save file, I didn't have the time to jump in and run through the prologue to prove it. Still, the fact that an iGPU can spit out these sort of frames at all at these settings (with heavy assistance, granted), is fairly impressive.
