Intel's Panther Lake Xe3 GPU Puts Up A Big Score In Leaked 3DMark Test Result

We wanted to like the original Intel Arc GPUs, but Xe was honestly a bit of a downer. That's why we were so impressed with Xe2, both in the form of the Lunar Lake integrated GPU as well as in the Battlemage discrete GPUs. Is it possible that Intel has pulled off another giant leap in architectural efficiency with Xe3? Maybe, if this leaked Time Spy result is the real deal.

The score originates from 笔记本电脑评测, which translates directly to simply "Laptop Reviews", but which we're going to refer to as Laptop Review Club, since that's the URL. This is a Chinese-language tech site that, as you might imagine, largely focuses on laptop reviews. To tell the truth, we're not too familiar with the site, but we did spot the infamous Golden Pig Upgrade among the authors on the site, which lends some credibility to this pre-release performance leak.


According to Laptop Review Club, Panther Lake's integrated GPU is quite fast, at least in Time Spy. Testing the "Core Ultra X9 388H", which is apparently the top-end configuration with 4 P-cores, 8 E-cores, 4 LP-cores, and twelve Xe3 cores, the site apparently produced a Time Spy Graphics score of 6233 points when using LPDDR5-8533 memory, and when overclocking that RAM to 9600 MT/s, the score increased slightly to 6300. This modest gain suggests that the chip is power or simply GPU-limited.

How do those scores compare to competitors and the previous generation? Well, the highest score ever submitted from a Lunar Lake processor to the 3DMark Score Explorer is 4505 points, while the average is 4086. What about AMD's Strix Point? 3DMark favors Intel a bit; the highest Radeon 890M graphics score is 4041 points, with the average there being just 3348. The mobile GeForce RTX 3050 gets passed, too, with a highest-ever graphics score of 6148, and an average of 4882.


This actually lines up exactly with Intel's claims, saying that Panther Lake's Xe3 integrated GPU offers ">50%" higher performance versus Lunar Lake's integrated GPU; of course, that's less impressive when you realize the Xe3 GPU in Panther Lake is 50% larger than the GPU in Lunar Lake. The company also says that performance per watt has improved "more than 40%" over Arrow Lake's performance per watt, although it's worth remembering that Arrow Lake actually uses an odd Xe-LPG+ architecture, being Xe-LPG with XMX added, not Xe2; the efficiency gains over Lunar Lake are probably more like 10 to 15%.

As we noted above, take this with a grain of salt—not that the source is necessarily unreliable, but because Intel GPUs typically overperform in 3DMark. We're dying to see how these chips perform in real games. Hopefully we won't have too much longer to wait, as Intel is currently in volume production of these chips on its in-house 18A process.