When I sat in on Intel's big showcase and press conference at IFA 2026, right at the start of this year, I left with one big impression – time might be up for gaming laptops pretty soon. The years of integrated graphics basically being a bit of a joke are now long gone, and Intel's Panther Lake chips underline that emphatically.
Where a few years ago you'd struggle to run even really old games well if your laptop wasn't a gaming one, with a dedicated GPU, now the iGPU performance of the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 chips (and Qualcomm and AMD's equivalents) needs to be seen to be believed.
