AMD Claims Laptop Gaming Beat Down Vs Intel And Brings The Receipts

Once upon a time, the idea of gaming on a machine without a discrete graphics card was basically a laughable proposition, at least if you were trying to play anything other than decades-old titles or other light weight games like Peggle (remember that gem?). That time has long past, and now we have an entire class of consumer devices, as well as the recent spate of gaming handhelds, that are essentially PCs built for playing graphically rich games entirely on integrated graphics.

AMD's not talking handhelds today, though. The company's focus is on thin & light laptops, where its Ryzen AI 300 processors are competing against Intel's new Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake CPUs. While the emphasis in reviews of these machines is often rightfully focused on productivity, content creation performance and battery life, AMD is pointing out that modern thin and light laptops can have some pretty serious gaming chops as well, and it is pitting its Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 mobile processor here against Intel's flagship Core Ultra 7 258V in sixteen popular game titles.

AMD claims "a clear win," and that its Radeon 890M is a full 75% faster on average compared to Intel's Arc Graphics 140V. This somewhat flies in the face of our own test results, but there's a key detail: AMD is testing the "Full Gaming Experience w/ Tech." That means AMD is comparing Intel's platform using any available graphics performance tuning technologies, such as XeSS super resolution against its Ryzen AI 300 Series using all available graphics technologies it has at its disposal, like FSR, etc.

AMD's list of performance-boosting graphics technologies is much longer than Intel's, so it should be no surprise that AMD comes out ahead in these comparisons. The second chart, below, is a bit more representative of raw GPU horsepower, as it includes comparisons without using performance boosting technologies, where Intel puts up a pretty strong fight—largely matching up with our observations in our Lunar Lake reviews, like of the ASUS Zenbook S 14.


It's not that AMD's comparisons are dishonest; you really can get this kind of performance uplift by using Hypr-RX, which will toggle on some combination of FidelityFX Super Resolution, Radeon Super Resolution, Radeon Boost, and Fluid Motion Frames for each game.

It's not really a true one-to-one comparison, though, because there are significant differences in image quality between these methods. AMD's FSR is technically inferior to Intel's AI-enhanced XeSS upscaling, while Radeon Super Resolution and Radeon Boost, by their very nature, trade-off game image quality in exchange for performance.


With that said, there's still merit to AMD's comparisons of course. XeSS simply isn't available in as many games as FSR, and in those games, Intel will be using FSR just as AMD does—but without the benefit of the other technologies, like Fluid Motion Frames. In games like Doom Eternal and Forza Horizon 5, where the Radeon 890M can already produce 60-plus frames per second, AFMF2 could be a real boon, pushing you into 120FPS high-frame-rate territory.

Plus, there are more benefits to AMD's Ryzen AI 300 processors, like the fact that they have as many as 50% more CPU cores than Intel's Lunar Lake counterparts, or the fact that the Radeon drivers are still a half-step ahead of Intel Arc, in terms of compatibility. There are other downsides too though, as battery life with Ryzen AI 300 is typically not as robust as Core Ultra 200 series. 


What's clear is that both AMD and Intel's current generation laptop CPUs are a considerable step forward from their previous-generation counterparts, in terms of graphics prowess, and we're eager to see more gaming-focused handhelds and mini-PCs ship with these SoCs onboard. Maybe silicon-graphene batteries will come down in price too, and we can see the dawn of handhelds with more than a couple of hours of runtime at full power. One can dream, right?