The new Core Ultra Series 3 chips and XeSS 3 AI upscaler can juice up frame rates on laptops, but handhelds may benefit the most.
The new Core Ultra Series 3 chips and XeSS 3 AI upscaler can juice up frame rates on laptops, but handhelds may benefit the most.The flagship Intel Core Ultra Series 3 chip is hiding surprising graphics capabilities, enough to play some high-end games, even without frame generation.
If your gaming machine isn’t rendering any frames itself, what’s the point of having a costly computer at all? I know some of you out there are mumbling resentments, asking that question already knowing the answer. To add to the grumbling, Intel has finally come off the line with its first edition of, and a new version of its existing upscaler promising to push gaming on lightweight devices. I’ve already tested it out on the. It’s a great laptop with a great chip. Now here comes the nitty-gritty of what that actually means for players desperate for one machine to finally do it all. Which brings me to the elephant in the room. Along with Panther Lake, Intel is offering players the chance toNvidia or AMD GPU. Intel’s head of Arc graphics, Tom Petersen, previously told Gizmodo he’s used it in multiple games, and he doesn’t even mind the odd graphical glitches it creates. The more important thing for him, he recently toldI can compromise on some things for a good gaming experience, but not on others. I’m hardly the crabbiest stickler for graphical purity. Frame generation is one of those software sleight-of-hand tricks that PC gamers have come to loathe. For some players, the barest concept of “fake frames” drives them mad, especially since they’re paying thousands of dollars for a gaming-capable PC. This latest rendition won’t change their minds.Intel’s latest XeSS 3 model is one of several AI upscalers that take an image rendered at a lower resolution and then use AI to massage those pixels into something resembling the promised resolution. This enhances frame rates at the cost of some visual fidelity. To the PC purists’ chagrin, many modern PC games enable upscalers such as Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR by default. Every major gaming console fromare both locked to proprietary hardware, Intel’s XeSS is device agnostic . Either way, XeSS multi-frame gen uses AI to inspect the scene to create multiple frames, which are then interpolated in between two fully rendered frames. XeSS had access to 2x frame generation before. Multi-frame generation only exacerbates the promise and problems inherent to frame interpolation. Intel touted the gaming abilities of the Core Ultra Series 3’s chips, and they are enticing. There are two varieties of these CPUs among the 14 offerings the chipmaker showed off earlier this year. The versions with an “X” in their name, namely the Intel Core Ultra X7 and X9, include the extra 12Xe3 GPU cores. These graphics cores based on the Arc B390 microarchitecture are supposed to offer strong performance for tasks like rendering and gaming, all without pushing these laptops’ total power package into the stratosphere.While XeSS is hardware agnostic, it does come with certain advantages on an Intel machine. Like Nvidia, Intel has special software to override in-game graphics settings to ensure they’re using the latest XeSS 3 model. You can set universal XeSS settings or frame generation to 2x, 3x, or 4x on a per-game basis. Unfortunately, the software sometimes fails to recognize which games are actually installed.can get close to 50 fps when running on “Ultra” settings at 1080p on the Asus Zenbook Duo. You’ll only maintain around 36 fps in benchmarks with the Zenbook Duo’s max 2,880 x 1,800 resolution. Once you enable XeSS, the frame rate can jump to closer to 45 fps, more or less depending on if you opt for “performance” or “quality” settings. If you want to play with any ray tracing at all, you can only expect playable frame rates with XeSS. Cyberpunk 2077 running on an Asus Zenbook Duo with ray tracing “low” settings and max resolution. It can still hit that frame rate without frame gen thanks to XeSS upscaling. Once frame generation comes online, that’s when I can start to play the game at near 60, near 80, and closer to 90 fps with 2x, 3x, or 4x frame generation, respectively. But here’s the major caveat. Frame generation causes two major issues: latency and visual artifacts. The game running at 4x frame gen feels noticeably floatier—though not unplayable. I could notice how when flicking the camera quickly, I would see ghostly flickering of streetlights and screens over the streets of Night City. What Intel doesn’t tell you is that to avoid any visual glitches, you want as close to 60 fps as possible already before you enable frame generation. If I dropdown to 1080p, then I can edge closer to 40 fps to keep ray tracing going and see less odd flickering. There were fewer problems with the existing 2x frame gen, in any case., I can net more than 90 fps indoors when the laptop is only rendering less than 30 fps. When running around, I noticed numerous graphical glitches with creeping shadows that climbed up the player character’s robes. Here you can see Hogwarts Legacy without and with frame generation. The game runs fairly well even without generated frames. Without frame generation, with Intel XeSS on balanced settings, I can hit a solid 40 fps to 50 fps in indoor environments and between 30 fps and 40 fps outdoors with all the graphics cranked up to max. Do I need 60 fps? I may as well reduce some graphics settings rather than make excuses for awkward graphical artifacting.with 4x frame gen with ray tracing settings set to ultra? Sure, I can get more than 60 fps in the game when the actual generated frame rate is close to 20 fps at the Zenbook Duo’s highest, 3K resolution. All I can say is that the laptop is doing its best, but there are some obvious and glaring visual artifacting that even the most tolerant player would find hard to excuse.Gamers are no monolith. Some players may not care about reducing their resolution to half of what their screen actually supports if it means a playable game. I’m one of those players who cannot stand to look at fuzzy textures and reduced UI detail for the sake of higher frame rates. I would rather reduce graphics settings than reduce my resolution. Mind you, those base frame rates I can get in games without frame generation are still impressive. On a Zenbook Duo, games likeare indeed playable and visually stunning in scenes. It’s the closest we’ve seen to the single-chip performance of AMD’s Strix Halo chips and at a much lower TDP and without AMD’s touted GPU architecture. And there’s the rub. You’ll need to sacrifice something for gaming on a mobile Intel Panther Lake device. For smaller, cheaper devices, upscaling and—yes—even frame generation make much more sense. It’s worth a look on a laptop , though I wouldn’t hinge my hopes on it. Intel has alreadyby promising we’ll see a handheld-specific chip, dubbed Intel Core G3. We may even see Intel-based handheld gaming PCs from companies like Acer and MSI later this year, or so we hope. There, 1080p gaming is the norm. When gaming on a smaller screen, it’s much harder to spot any visual inconsistencies. For the sake of playable frame rates on the go, Intel may already be kicking in AMD’s teeth on its way through the door. For now, Intel’s fake frames on laptops will still be a mixed bag. Some who buy an expensive laptop with one of Intel’s higher-end GPU chips may not care about floatier controls or awkward visuals if they can push their frame rate to near the max of what their display is capable of. Others may be more gun-shy, and rightfully so.Samsung Goes All-In on Its Bluetooth Trackers as Galaxy SmartTag2 Drops to an All-Time Low Right After Apple’s AirTag 2 LaunchAsus Zenbook Duo Review: A Stacked Laptop in More Ways Than OneDo You Actually Need the Best Gaming CPU?It's got an incredibly bright OLED screen with performance that will keep you from using it for much else than work.This may be the moment when ARM really takes off on PCs, though it couldn't come at a worse time.Razer doesn't know exactly what it's creating, but it still wants you to put money down on its desktop AI gadget.
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