Intel’s graphics processors are finally coming, starting with Arc 3-powered laptops. While we don’t know what performance is going to look like, the technology looks promising.
As long as gaming laptops have existed, there have only been two companies that have produced GPUs for them. Nvidia and AMD have had an iron grip on the market for years, and now Intel Arc mobile graphics processors are finally here. I don’t know if an Arc 7 GPU is going to be faster than an RTX 3080 Ti – it probably won’t – but since it’s Intel at the helm, I at least know it’s going to result in a good experience. To be clear, while Intel has said that laptops using its Arc 3 graphics are available now, I have not even seen one in person, so all I have to go off of is the information that Intel has provided. I’m not exactly in the business of trusting internal benchmarks, and neither should you. But let’s be honest, while AMD and Nvidia both make mobile graphics solutions, the best gaming laptops on the market are using a combination of Intel processors and Nvidia graphics. AMD Navi started to chip away at Team Green’s dominance, but Intel can hit a lot harder, and it’s about more than raw frame rates. Intel has had a rocky few years, as it tried to catch up with AMD’s Zen architecture. But even when Intel was furthest behind in terms of raw performance, it still excelled where it really matters – especially for laptops – reliability. When you’re looking at charts and numbers it’s pretty easy to forget about what the experience of actually using something is like, and Intel processors have never really had the same kind of adjustment period as AMD processors do. It seems like every time a new AMD chipset comes out on desktop, there are a number of critical bugs that Team Red has to jump on after release.
