When I sat in on Intel’s large showcase and press convention at IFA 2026, proper at first of this yr, I left with one large impression – time is perhaps up for gaming laptops fairly quickly. The years of built-in graphics principally being a little bit of a joke at the moment are lengthy gone, and Intel’s Panther Lake chips underline that emphatically.
Where a couple of years in the past you’d battle to run even actually previous video games effectively in case your laptop computer wasn’t a gaming one, with a devoted GPU, now the iGPU efficiency of the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 chips (and Qualcomm and AMD’s equivalents) must be seen to be believed.
The excellent living proof within the case of Panther Lake is Battlefield 6, the topic of a partnership between Intel and writer Electronic Arts that makes positive the sport has full compatibility with Intel’s varied methods. These come collectively to allow you to use upscaling from XeSS and new body technology choices to run at a genuinely phenomenal degree of efficiency.
I performed the sport for a couple of minutes in Las Vegas, however knew I wanted to return for extra, and bought a couple of extra hours below my belt right here within the UK on the brand new Asus Zenbook Duo (2026) while testing it for review. This just underlined how mad the performance can feel when you’re actually playing with it.
For a bit of balance, I headed to a game that hasn’t had any specific optimisations, and had a good time with a sampling of Doom: The Dark Ages. Its benchmarking modes showed that I could get really playable framerates on low presets, and I feel confident that a patch could unlock even better performance if desired.
All of this is on an unplugged laptop, to be clear, and while the chips in question aren’t exactly cheap, the direction (and speed) of travel in terms of iGPU performance is quite crazy.
This year, I expect to test a whole heap more gaming laptops, as various brands bring out new models featuring Intel’s chips, and I don’t think we’re at the tipping point yet where they no longer represent good value.
In fact, I think that tipping point remains years away. However, we are already at the point where someone who only has a tangential interest in gaming probably no longer needs a GPU in their laptop to be able to enjoy games on the go.
Given that most big gaming laptops turn their discrete GPUs off when unplugged, the case for a normal laptop that can also game is getting more persuasive every year. For now, if you want super-reliable graphics that scale across any and all games, you’re still going to want a gaming laptop.
In five years, though, I’ll be fascinated to see how small the gap between iGPU performance with upscaling and frame generation tools, compared to a full GPU, will have become. Just as interesting will be the way that a heap of brands navigate that turbulence when it becomes more pressing.