Intel is expected to host a grand reveal for its rumored "Arc G3" series of chips for handhelds at the upcoming Computex 2026 show. According to Videocardz, one of those handhelds is being cooked up by Acer and is called the "Predator Atlas 8," suggesting it's an 8-inch device, likely going up against the MSI Claw 8.

The Arc G3 series is Intel's expected handheld push based on Panther Lake silicon, customized for maximum efficiency and competing against the Ryzen Z2 platform, which it teased at CES (though without the "Arc G3" name).

The Predator Atlas would be Acer's fourth handheld following the three models from its "Nitro Blaze" lineup: Blaze 7, Blaze 8, and Blaze 11. You might've never heard of those names because Acer hasn't released the Blaze 8 and 11 in global markets, while the Blaze 7 was never marketed enough to make a splash. Donning the new handheld in Predator branding, though, would suggest a more serious attempt at converting some of the Acer Predator laptop audience to a handheld.

Apart from the fact that it may reportedly feature an 8-inch screen, we don't know anything else about the rumored Predator Atlas 8. We do know quite a bit about Panther Lake, however. The Arc G3 was known as "Core G3" up until a couple of months ago, with leaks suggesting that the series has been delayed into Q2 2026. Intel has also famously taken digs at AMD's Z2 series, claiming it uses "ancient silicon," so it'll be interesting to see how G3 performs.

As mentioned, Intel teased its handheld push earlier this year alongside the Core Ultra Series 3 launch, but we didn't really get any details at the time. Since then, rumors have pointed toward two different SKUs: a standard Arc G3 and a G3 Extreme — both are tipped to have the same 14 cores split across a 2P+8E+4LP-E configuration, with integrated graphics where the silicon is expected to differ.

The base model likely has an Arc B370 iGPU with 10 Xe3 cores based on the "Celestial" architecture. The same graphics, core config, and a (P-core) boost clock speed of 4.7 GHz are also seen on the Core Ultra 5 338H processor, so the G3 could be an offshoot of that silicon. The Arc G3 extreme reportedly houses an Arc B390 iGPU instead, which would consist of 12 Xe3 cores; the Core Ultra X9 388H and Core Ultra X7 386H have the same iGPU.

Given Panther Lake's advances in gaming performance and efficiency across the board, the Arc G3 lineup should easily stand its ground against AMD's Ryzen Z2 family. We should expect the Red and Blue Teams to trade blows at mid to high power levels, but at lower wattages, Intel may be hard to beat, considering Lunar Lake was already impressive in that department.

Panther Lake debuted Intel's latest Xe3 graphics architecture, but the IP isn't said to expand beyond iGPUs. For a while, we've known that "Xe3P" (codenamed Celestial) will serve as the refined follow-up, with many awaiting a proper successor to the existing Arc B-series dedicated GPUs. Unfortunately, a massive new leak dump from reliable tipster Jaykihn claims Intel canceled discrete gaming GPUs for Celestial a long time ago, and their fate hangs in the balance for even the next-gen Xe4 "Druid" architecture.

Originally, Xe3 was supposed to be Celestial with a planned 2025 launch, but Intel changed it to Battlemage, pushing Xe3P to be Celestial instead. That's why the iGPUs inside Panther Lake chips are classified as Battlemage parts. Last year, Intel announced the Crescent Island data center GPU as the first Xe3P/Celestial product, featuring an unprecedented 160 GB of LPDDR5X VRAM, slated for a 2026 release (that Jaykihn confirms for late 2026).

Xe3P is also reportedly used across Nova Lake for the display and media engine block, while a special NVL-S desktop CPU featuring 12 Xe3P cores (iGPU) is also in the works; NVL-S otherwise features only 2 Xe cores. Nova Lake-H (mobile) is rumored to use Xe3P throughout the entire lineup. So that, mixed with Cresent Island, perhaps Arc Pro-series workstation GPUs, and the rumored "Razor Lake-AX" (Strix Halo competitor after Nova Lake-AX was canned), constitutes the entirety of Xe3P.

There is no discrete gaming-focused graphics card planned. That means Battlemage will remain Intel's latest gaming dGPU at least until the next-gen Xe4/Druid architecture comes along. Jaykihn's leak points to a late-2027 release for Druid, but the possibility of a discrete gaming GPU remains "up in the air." Intel is planning to focus on the AI sector once again, with "Jaguar Shores" marking the debut of Xe4.

Around the same time, the "Titan Lake" mainstream consumer CPUs might also feature Xe4 IP for integrated graphics and/or other display blocks. A supposed "Arc D-series" for gamers yearning for a next-gen dedicated GPU from Intel remains unconfirmed. The successor to Xe4 is rumored to be planned for mid-to-late 2028, according to the leak, and is likely to debut on whatever comes after Jaguar Shores in the rack-scale segment.

All of this information is, of course, subject to change and of a speculative nature. Intel's roadmaps haven't been the most consistent, so take these leaks with a grain of salt. The main takeaway is how Intel has almost given up on the discrete gaming GPU market after a turbulent launch for Alchemist and Battlemage. Given the AI boom we're in, it's easy to understand how Celestial production could've been entirely reallocated to serve the datacenter and workstation markets. Let's hope that Druid marks the revival of dedicated gaming GPUs from the Blue Team.

Whether you're a student submitting homework, at work typing away at documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, or you're just someone who wants to access resources online and connect with family and friends, you want a laptop with the components and features you'll need to get the job done. That means a great screen, a comfortable keyboard, and long battery life (and nice design doesn't hurt, either!).

The laptop space is more competitive than ever. Windows machines come from many companies using silicon from three major CPU vendors: Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. Apple, meanwhile, has a range of powerful and portable systems based on its own Apple Silicon.

In 2026, Intel's most recent chips are its Intel Core Ultra (Series 3) chips, code-named Panther Lake, while AMD launched its "Gorgon Point" Ryzen AI processors at CES. At Computex, Nvidia announced that its RTX Spark chips will launch in laptops from Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo, HP, and more starting in the fall, taking on Qualcomm in the Windows on Arm space. Earlier this year, Qualcomm released its Snapdragon X2 Elite Xtreme, Elite, and Plus chips.

On Macs, Apple's top chips are the M5 series, including the M5 Pro and M5 Max, which can be found in the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air lineup.

Best Laptops You Can Buy Today

The Best Laptop (and Mac) overall

The MacBook Air has been a go-to laptop recommendation for quite some time, thanks to strong performance, a fanless design, excellent built quality, and long-lasting battery life. With the version of the chip with M5, you get the benefits of years of hardware revisions since the Air's last redesign with M2, including a minimum 16GB of RAM and a 12-megapixel webcam.

The M5 chip in the MacBook Air showed off excellent single and multi-core performance. In fact, it;s closest rival was the same chip in the MacBook Pro, which gets a boost because of an active fan.

That being said, the system can throttle under heavy workloads like rendering. But for most people's typical tasks, including writing, editing, making spreadsheets, editing photos, listening to music, programming, and general multitasking, you'll have a very powerful machine.

Apple has boosted the base MacBook Air's price to $1,099, but it now starts with 512GB of memory. Given the price of components these days, the laptop is still a great value. If you want a Mac but don't want to spend that much for it, you could take a step down to the entry-level MacBook Neo, starting at $599, as long as you're willing to sacrifice on power, memory, ports, and a backlit keyboard.

Read: MacBook Air (M5) review

Best Windows laptop

The Dell XPS 14 is back, and while you might expect its performance or design to be the headlining feature, it's the battery life that wows. With its base 1920 x 1200 LCD display, which has a variable refresh rate that goes all the way down to 1 Hz, it lasted 20 hours and 41 minutes on our battery test.

That's not to say the battery life is all there is to like about this laptop. The 3-pound chassis is sleek, and Dell added a function row back to the keyboard, making it way easier to use over the touch bar of yesteryear.

If you're OK with 12 hours of charge, more expensive models with a tandem OLED display have way better colors and more powerful Arc B390 integrated graphics.

That being said, both of them have a low-travel keyboard without space between the keys, which definitely tripped up my fingers, so you'll need time to get your muscle memory going. And the starting price, at $1,600, is a lot to ask but is unfortunately common as the memory crisis rages on.

Read: Dell XPS 14 (2026) review

Best ultralight laptop

Some of the best laptops are barely noticeable in your bag. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition, at 2.15 pounds is extremely light.

Still, despite the weight, you get plenty of other benefits. The speakers are surprisingly good for a laptop of this size. Perhaps most impressively, the system ran for 16 hours and 38 minutes on our battery test, outlasting many of the laptops we bit against it by multiple hours.

The system also offers a lovely display. The POLED touchscreen measured 476 nits of brightness while falling in similar gamut ranges as other OLED notebooks that weren't as luminous.

There are some downsides. There are limited ports outside of Thunderbolt 4/USB-C, including a lack of a headphone jack. And CPU performance fell behind some competitors, like Apple's M5 MacBook Air and a thicker AMD-based 2-in-1 from HP.Still, the laptop impressed for its airiness and multimedia strengths. And as tested with 32GB at $1,519, it's not a crazy price as the costs of many laptops skyrocket during an ongoing component shortage.

Read: Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition review

Another great Windows clamshell

We can argue about how much the AI PC is really any sort of revolution, but there are still some strong ultraportables coming out. The HP OmniBook Ultra puts the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 in a sleek chassis with strong productivity performance.

HP is offering up decent battery life here, running for 12 hours and 52 minutes on our battery test. That's not the best, but all things considered including the high-resolution display, it's not bad. It's also nice to see Thunderbolt 4 ports on an AMD system, which is exceedingly rare.

The experience is knocked down a bit by a significant amount of bloatware, but if you're looking for a strong AMD laptop, the HP OmniBook Ultra is a strong competitor if you don't mind doing some uninstalling.

Read: HP OmniBook Ultra review

The best budget laptop

If you're looking for an affordable laptop, Apple does it best these days. The MacBook Neo starts at $599 ($499 with an education discount), but you rarely feel like you're not getting enough – unlike most Windows laptops in this price range. The Neo has a premium, all-metal chassis, a bright, vivid screen, and a custom mechanical trackpad that lets you click anywhere. And yes, you get all of macOS running on what was formerly an iPhone chip.

The quality of the 13-inch chassis and screen are key here. You're not getting something plastic. You're not getting something low-resolution, and you're not getting something dim. You also get a great webcam for this price range, and the system stays remarkably cool. There are some niceties you sacrifice, however. Apple has gone without a backlit keyboard. And the two USB ports aren't labeled, so you'll have to remember which is the faster 10 Gbps USB 3 port (the back one) for backup drives and monitors, lest you end up with an error message.

I suspect that most people with light workloads — especially students and people using home computers doing a lot of work in the browser — won't have too much trouble with the 8GB of RAM. That being said, 16GB systems can be found in the Windows world for a bit more money, though you'll need to hunt for sales.

But if a premium laptop experience (including great build quality and a high-res screen) are important to you, Apple delivers that better than any Windows machine priced close to the Neo’s $599 starting price.

Read: MacBook Neo review

The Best Laptop for work

There are plenty of reasons why the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is a classic. It's thin design and strong build quality are beloved by ThinkPad diehards. The latest model, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 11), offers long battery life and great speakers.

Perhaps most critically, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon offers an excellent keyboard. Lenovo's reputation was built on great typing experiences, so this is crucial. For those who love Lenovo's TrackPoint, it's still here, allowing you to move the mouse without ever taking your fingers away from the home row on the keyboard.

The latest version comes with Intel's 13th Gen Core processors. We reviewed it with a Core i7-1355U, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB PCIe Gen 4 SSD.

The one real issue we had is that the base screen could benefit from being a bit brighter. Those who want the most vivid experience can opt for an OLED panel, but at a higher price.

When shopping for the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 11), keep an eye out for Lenovo's frequent sales, as there's often a deal available.

Read: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 11) Review

The Best Windows Tablet

Microsoft may push the Surface Pro as a do-it-all AI machine, but the truth is it's just a really nice, portable, slim PC that lasts a long time on a battery and includes a beautiful OLED display. It's definitively one of the best Surfaces to date.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processors offer enough performance to keep up with x86 competitors, making this one of the first Arm-based Surfaces that doesn't feel like it's lacking. Add on more Arm-compatible apps than ever, including the Chrome browser, and there's far less to miss from previous Intel models. That's not to say it's perfect — there are still some gaming issues, as well as drivers for specialized peripherals that may need to be rebuilt for the new platform.

The 45 TOPS NPU powers some of Windows 11's Copilot+ features, like Cocreator, Live Captions, and Windows Studio effects. None of these are showstoppers, but they're cool tricks.'

If you want a premium tablet running Windows 11, the Surface Pro is one of the only premium games in town. And that means paying a premium for a separate keyboard. But for those who love this form factor, the Surface Pro remains the best option out there.

Read: Microsoft Surface Pro review

A more powerful Mac laptop

The MacBook Air is a great starting point, but if you want an air-cooled processor and a few more features, the base MacBook Pro adds a few niceties. The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts with an M5 processor, has three Thunderbolt ports (including one on the right side), and a beautiful micro LED display.

For those willing to spend an extra $150, there's a nano-texture display option that is completely worth it if you ever use your laptop outside. The matte display looks excellent, and was great on desks near windows.

If you need the most power possible, we also reviewed the MacBook Pro with an M5 Max, including a 40-core GPU, a mix of Apple's latest performance and super cores, and a blazing fast SSD.

Both the 14-inch and 16-inch laptops offer great speakers and beautiful displays, but you will have to pay quite a bit for any storage or memory upgrades you want, and you won't be able to make changes later.

Read: MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5) review
Read: MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max) review

The Best Gaming laptop

Razer Blade 18 offers some of the strongest gaming performance we've seen in a laptop, but also features excellent design, comfortable features, and the latest connection standards. At $5,199.99 as tested, it sure should be good. It tops our list of the best gaming laptops.

The major highlight is the dual-mode display, which has two options: 3840 x 2400 at 240 Hz or 1920 x 1200 at 440 Hz. Those two choices (which you can switch between in Razer Synapse) is enough to showcase both intensive, graphics-driven games at high settings and esports where frames are more important than resolution and detail.

The laptop, packed with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU in our review configuration, outperformed the field in our gaming tests, especially at the lower resolution.Razer is one of the few laptop makers using Thunderbolt 5 ports (we've also seen them from MSI and Apple), so this system is ready to go if you're using advanced peripherals or the fastest external storage drives.

Perhaps the biggest downside is that the Blade's dual 2TB storage drives use PCIe 4.0 rather than 5.0. You won’t notice this in games or mainstream productivity, but if you want PCIe 5.0 speed for future proofing or 8K video editing, the Titan may still be the way to go. The Blade 18 does support PCIe 5.0 drives, if you want to upgrade to speedier storage in the future.

Read: Razer Blade 18 review

Other Laptops We Tested

💻 Asus Zenbook A16

The Zenbook A16 has Qualcomm's powerful Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme processor, including 48GB of RAM on the package. While the chip is fast, the laptop, while lightweight, didn't meet our expectations. While light, it flexed and didn't feel premium; battery life was lesser than competitors; and while emulation is better than it used to be, there are still some compatibility issues with Windows on Arm for power users.

Read: Asus Zenbook A16 review

💻 Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra

Samsung's Galaxy Book6 Ultra is a powerful system for creatives, thanks in part to the RTX 5070 GPU in the version we tested. The OLED screen is beautiful and you get an nice design (albeit one that is quite similar to Macs), but this laptop is pricey, and you get a shallow keyboard.

Read: Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra review

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Social media accounts officially representing Crimson Desert have apologized for prior dismissive language regarding Intel GPUs. “We apologize for any confusion our FAQ wording from several hours ago regarding playability on Intel Arc GPUs may have caused,” said a statement on X. Furthermore, it is made clear that work is now taking place to implement compatibility and optimize for Intel Arc graphics processors.

Circling back to just before the weekend, the PC gaming community seemed stunned by a blunt statement found in the Crimson Desert FAQ that suggested Intel Arc users simply find something else to play. In brief, that FAQ stated there was no support for Intel Arc GPUs, and if you’d bought the game to play on one of the Blue Team’s graphics cards or iGPUs, you should seek a refund from where you'd bought the game.

Many folks found this official statement troubling. Firstly, this is one of the hottest gaming titles around right now. Secondly, we didn’t have any hint of the reasoning behind such a sweeping decision. One must remember that while Intel is a relatively small player in discrete graphics cards, it is the leader in iGPUs. Moreover, its newer generation iGPUs are increasingly impressive. For example, the low-wattage Core Ultra 300H series mobile processors packing Arc B390 graphics can match the classic Nvidia GTX 1060 in modern titles. There’s a decade between their launch dates, but the 1060 is notable for making the grade in the official Crimson Desert minimum specs.

It is great to see the Crimson Desert devs change tack on Intel graphics. We reported a short time after the ‘no Arc gamers’ FAQ find, that Intel had reached out to developer Pearl Abyss “many times” concerning collaborative efforts. Intel stated in an email to Tom’s Hardware that it was “hugely disappointed that players using Intel graphics hardware can’t jump into the world of Pywel at launch.” Intel wrapped up its message by saying it was ready to assist the game devs however it could.

Perhaps, this chipmaking heavyweight’s clear disappointment and offers of help oiled the wheels deep at Pearl Abyss. “We are currently working on compatibility and optimization support so that Crimson Desert can also be enjoyed on Intel Arc GPU systems,” said the official social media account for the game today. “We are preparing to provide a smooth and stable gameplay experience, and we ask for your patience until the support update becomes available.”

For those interested in more Crimson Desert news and features, we recently shared our CPU scaling test results.

Crimson Desert, the new game from developer Pearl Abyss of Black Desert Online fame, launched today with a surprising caveat – the game doesn’t support Intel Arc graphics, one of which ranks among the best GPUs. It doesn’t seem like it will any time soon, either, with the game’s official FAQ suggesting that Intel Arc users seek out a refund. Intel has fired back, saying that it has reached out to Pearl Abyss “many times” and even provided the studio with early access to hardware and drivers across multiple Intel products.

“We’re aware that Crimson Desert currently doesn’t launch on systems with Intel GPUs and we’re hugely disappointed that players using Intel graphics hardware can’t jump into the world of Pywel at launch,” wrote Intel’s developer team in an email sent to Tom's Hardware and other outlets. "Over the past several years, we’ve reached out to Pearl Abyss many times to help test, validate, and optimize support for Intel graphics, providing early hardware, drivers, and engineering resources across multiple generations, including Alchemist, Battlemage, Meteor Lake, and Lunar Lake."

Currently, if you try to launch Crimson Desert with an Arc GPU, you'll be presented with an error message that reads, "the graphics device is currently not supported." Although Pearl Abyss has said that Arc graphics aren't supported officially at this time, other users have encountered similar errors.

On the Steam discussion boards, there are over 100 posts that reference this specific error, many of them seeing the error on AMD or Nvidia GPUs.

It's unclear if Pearl Abyss will add Arc support in the future, but the company's guidance for Arc users to consult the return policy of the platform they purchased the game on suggests support isn't coming soon. Intel, for its part, has put the blame back on the developer: "For details on the choice not to enable Intel support at launch, please reach out directly to Pearl Abyss."

Intel's discrete GPUs make up only a sliver of the total market. In JPR's most recent AIB report, Intel cracked just 1% of market share against AMD and Nvidia. However, Intel graphics extend far beyond the discrete desktop market, with Arc GPUs in Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake, and Panther Lake laptops.

"Our teams are deeply committed to helping all studios deliver the best experience possible, providing open tools, documentation, and direct engineering support to make sure their games run well for everyone, including the tens of millions of players using Intel GPUs. We remain ready to assist Pearl Abyss however we can," wrote Intel.

Microsoft launched Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD) last year as part of the DirectX SDK, but it was limited to only the ROG Xbox Ally devices at the time. The feature was always intended to eventually go mainstream — and Intel has just released a new graphics driver that brings a version of it to Arc GPUs. The company is calling it "Precompiled Shader Distribution" and it's available on select mobile and desktop chips.

Precompiled Shader Distribution downloads the shaders for a game ahead of time, so you don't have to wait for the shader cache to build up when you first open it. The process happens automatically in the background once the Intel Graphics app detects you have the game installed. Depending on your exact hardware config, it starts downloading shaders from Intel's cloud and loads them into a dedicated folder.

Intel told TechPowerUp it is "also working with Microsoft on launching Advanced Shader Delivery later this year," meaning that this is Intel's own implementation for now — it will only get better from here (hopefully). The feature is launching with 13 Steam games: They're all heavy-hitters and will offer some level of faster loading, while reducing shader stuttering mid-gameplay.

• Black Myth: Wukong
• Borderlands 4
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
• Cyberpunk 2077
• God of War Ragnarök
• Gotham Knights
• Hogwarts Legacy
• NBA 2K26
• Starfield
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
• The Outer Worlds 2

The company is claiming this will make your games load 2x faster on Arc B-series discrete GPUs and on the Core Ultra 200 series' integrated graphics, on average. The latest Panther Lake lineup with Xe3 graphics will benefit even more and will receive an average 3x improvement in game loading times. There's no support for Arc Alchemist yet — and it may not be coming soon, since Intel lists the latest Arc GPUs as a hardware requirement.

In the benchmarks shared, God of War: Ragnarok was the most impressive by far, loading an insane 37 times faster with Precompiled Shader Distribution on an Arc B390 iGPU. The Oblivion Remaster only saw a 1.3x improvement across both the Arc B580 graphics card and the Arc 140V iGPU on a Core Ultra 9 288V. Of course, not every game will take full advantage of this feature — especially not right away.

But as Advanced Shader Delivery becomes commonplace and other chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD started introducing it on the driver level, shader caching issues should slowly become a thing of the past. PC will be able to achieve parity with console in yet another field, since its plus point — the variety of hardware configs — has actually held back precompiled shaders from being a possibility on the platform for a long time.

Precompiled Shader Delivery will also update cache for all the shaders alongside new drivers, so your game is always running smoothly. Within the driver release, Intel actually calls this feature "Graphics Shader Distribution Service" — but it refers to the same thing. If you want to enable it on your own Arc GPU, open the Intel Graphics Software, go to Graphics, then 3D Rendering, and you'll see the toggle right there.

Intel has begun rolling out support for XeSS 3, its next-generation AI-powered upscaling technology with Multi-Frame Generation, through a new graphics driver update. First announced at last year’s Intel Tech Tour event in Arizona, XeSS Multi-Frame Generation offers similar 2x, 3x, and 4x modes (one, two, or three additional frames), much like Nvidia’s DLSS Multi-Frame Generation.

During the showcase, Intel said that XeSS 3 with Multi-Frame Generation will not require developers to update existing XeSS 2 titles to add support. Any game that already supports XeSS 2 frame generation will be compatible with XeSS MFG and can be enabled via an override in the Intel Graphics Software control panel. Depending on the game title, Intel also expects XeSS MFG settings to be available via in-game settings in the future. Since XeSS 3 supports Arc GPUs with XMX units, the new upscaling tech will be available on Arc A-series and B-series discrete GPUs as well as integrated graphics solutions powered by Xe2/Xe3.

In our early hands-on of Intel’s XeSS Multi-Frame Generation on a Panther Lake engineering system at Intel’s Tech Tour event, we found that the image quality was impressive, with no obvious artifacts that made the generated frames stand out. That said, input lag felt high for fast-paced shooters, and we were also left unconvinced by Intel’s reliance on baseline frame rates as a measure of acceptable input lag, as the two don’t always correlate as closely as the company implies.

The latest Intel Graphics Driver versions 32.0.101.8425 and 32.0.101.8362 also serve as the launch drivers for Intel’s newly announced Arc B390 and B370 iGPU solutions, available on the latest Core Ultra 3 series (codenamed Panther Lake) mobile CPUs. Additionally, the drivers also cover Intel’s existing Arc A-series and B-series discrete GPUs, along with a wide range of integrated graphics across the Core Ultra processor family, including Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake, Arrow Lake-S, and Arrow Lake-H.

Release notes for the latest driver additionally mention fixes for specific crashes seen in the Pragmata Sketchbook demo on certain Arc and Core Ultra hardware, as well as a correction to a display software issue where the Variable Refresh Rate range showcased incorrect values in the settings interface.

A number of known issues across Intel Arc and Core Ultra platforms have also been listed including color corruption and crashes in titles like Ghost of Tsushima, The Finals, No Man’s Sky, Star Citizen, and Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, as well as intermittent graphical corruption in Call of Duty Black Ops 6 and benchmark instability in PugetBench for DaVinci Resolve Studio.

Rumors of a successor to Intel's Arc A770 discrete GPU have been floating around for more than a year at this point, with a new launch window finally seeming on the horizon. Following various leaks, the Arc B770, has just appeared on an undisclosed Intel GitHub repository, with code specifically mentioning "b770." While this isn't an official confirmation, it's easy to connect the dots and see the B770 is closer than ever.

Arc B770 will be part of Intel's second-gen discrete GPU architecture known as "Battlemage," using Xe2 cores, which was supposed to be a lot more ambitious at one point, but the plans seem to have dwindled. Right now, Intel has moved on to Xe3 cores in its Panther Lake mobile chips, though that's still classified as Battlemage (and not Celestial).

Anyhow, prior leaks have revealed some of the specs we can expect in the B770, including the large BMG-G31 die it uses, featuring 32 Xe2 cores. That's a big jump from the 20 Xe cores found on the last-gen A770. The GPU will also feature at least 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM saturated across a 256-bit wide bus. While some rumors point toward more than 16, it's highly unlikely now given the DRAM shortage the industry has plunged into.

The card will compete with AMD's RX 9060-class and Nvidia's RTX 5060-class offerings, with a reported TGP of up to 300W. There's no info on clock speeds, but we know it will be fabricated using TSMC's N5 process, since that's what other Battlemage GPUs use. Intel has also made strides with its driver suite since the last time we saw a B-series card be revealed, which was the B570 at CES 2025, one year ago.

In the past few months, the company has launched workstation-grade offerings under the Xe2 family: Arc Pro B50 and B60, but we haven't seen any new gaming GPUs. On the software side, there are rumors about an in-house multi-frame generation tech in the works at Intel, which could coincide with the launch of the Arc B770.

The timing makes sense since CES 2026 is set to open its doors in just two days - and Intel has a conference scheduled. The arrival of Arc B770 will lend some much-needed competition to Nvidia and AMD in the midrange GPU segment. Of course, it needs to be priced right, but given Intel's track record with Alchemist, it's not unreasonable to get your hopes up.

GPU overclocker TrashBench set a world overclocking record on an Intel Arc B580 GPU with a relatively simple setup. Instead of employing exotic solutions like liquid nitrogen, used by other overclockers to hit world records, he instead slapped on a pond pump and filled the custom loop with a 50/50 glycol mix of vehicle antifreeze that had been pre-chilled in a freezer. To his surprise, the GPU hit an incredible -17 degrees Celsius (that’s 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit), allowing him to push the performance of Intel’s top-of-the-line consumer GPU. According to the YouTube video, the car-coolant-chilled graphics card achieved a 3DMark Time Spy score of 16,631 — some 12% higher than a stock GPU, breaking the world record for the B580.

The mods TrashBench made to the GPU were rather simple, with the most complicated part being 3D-printing a custom mount to secure the water block. Trashbench notes that antifreeze remains liquid until roughly -25C, and he chilled the liquid in his freezer, which took it down to -17C. From there, he ran a couple of flexible tubes into an open cooler containing the pre-chilled glycol mix and turned on the pump to circulate it, allowing the graphics card to reach sub-zero temperatures.

TrashBench broke a world record in 3DMark Time Spy when the coolant was still cold.

He also tested the Intel Arc B580 in its stock configuration, with the card hitting 2,850 MHz on air cooling alone. This delivered an average of 54, 158, and 107 FPS for Monster Hunter Wilds, Forza Horizon 5, and Cyberpunk 2077, respectively. But with the GPU running on sub-zero cooling, it achieved 3,316 MHz — some 446 MHz over stock performance or a 16.4% higher clock speed. Unfortunately, because the coolant eventually warmed up during testing, TrashBench wasn’t able to maximize its performance, but even so, the card still hit 69, 174, and 120 FPS in the three titles, giving it an average of 16% more FPS.

TrashBench's results show that with just air OC, the B580 achieved 3200 MHz, with the card hitting 60 FPS on Monster Hunter Wilds, 119 FPS on Cyberpunk 2077, and 172 FPS on Forza Horizon 5 at 1080p High settings. Although extreme cooling still seems to offer more FPS, it wasn't a huge gain over what you get without any of the hardware modifications.

New code unearthed in Intel's Arc graphics driver files could point to the company's plans to launch its own answer to Nvidia's multi-frame generation tech. Multi-frame generation, or MFG for short, debuted in Nvidia's keynote last year as part of its pitch for the RTX 50 series. Ada Lovelace could already do regular frame gen — inserting an AI-generated frame between two real ones — but Blackwell took it one step further — using up to three interpolated frames created from an actually rendered one. So far, neither Intel nor AMD has an answer to this, though that appears to be changing soon, according to the r/IntelArc subreddit.

Scouring through the latest Arc drivers, user u/Organic-Bird-587 stumbled upon a mention of "Multi-Frame Generation (XeSS)" in the files. That was accompanied by an image that could potentially be the new logo for Intel's MFG, suggesting that the chipmaker might be working on its own multi-frame generation tech set to debut soon. Despite Arc facing fresh scrutiny following the recent Nvidia-Intel deal, the company is still believed to be working on Battlemage — its current-gen discrete GPU architecture — and states it remains committed to its Arc graphics project, which could include its fabled B770 card.

Driver Built XeSS Frame Generation Might be on the way. from r/IntelArc

Pairing up the B770 launch with MFG could be a huge win for Intel, netting them an answer to Nvidia's multi-frame tech. AMD currently offers no MFG solution of its own, so this could be the moment to establish a unique selling point for Arc versus AMD graphics cards. Still, it's important to note that this is purely speculative, and finding trinkets of unreleased or unannounced products is commonplace in driver code — until there's confirmation from Intel, take this with a huge grain of salt, although it would make sense given the current landscape.

Nvidia's historic $5 billion investment into Intel last week seemed to put the company's Arc graphics lineup in jeopardy, especially after the announcement that would see Intel create new chips featuring GPU chiplets from Nvidia. Intel later clarified that Arc will remain in development and that RTX GPUs are "complementary" — a stance that lines up with this news, as MFG is purely Nvidia's play at the moment, so offering a competitor to that almost reinforces hope that Arc is still on the battlefront, fighting to carve out its own space in a crowded market.

Intel released the Arc A750 roughly three years ago as part of its first generation "Alchemist" lineup of discrete GPUs. It launched with 8GB of GDDR6 memory saturated across a 256-bit bus. While the card's specs are nothing extraordinary, a new version of the A750 has just surfaced — seemingly with double the VRAM and twice as wide of a memory bus — which never came out. It looks like a prototype and @komenezumi1006 on X claims they have one.

This unusual A750 is from Gunnir, an experienced name in the Intel Arc community that has developed a myriad of GPUs for the Blue Team. Therefore, it stands to reason that Gunnir was possibly experimenting with different versions of the A750 with Intel, including this one with 16 GB of memory and a 512-bit bus. It's not just for show either, as the card pops up with the full 16 GB VRAM in Task Manager, so it seems to be a working engineering sample.

The user has provided images that confirm there's only one core on the card, turning down speculation of a dual-GPU prototype with double the memory. That still doesn't explain the wider 512-bit bus. Perhaps it's been mislabeled by someone who thought that twice the VRAM capacity means twice the bus width. Regardless, it's an interesting sample, but it unfortunately wasn't benchmarked, so we don't know how it performs (or if it's better than the standard A750).

Intel's Arc Pro B50 has appeared on a benchmark listing for the first time, providing a realistic idea of its performance. Spotted by Benchleak, the B50 was seen on Geekbench, where it scored 78,661 points in the Vulkan GPU test and 69,890 points in the OpenCL test. Those are relatively modest numbers, but somewhat expected given the card's specifications. The B50 is the lowest-end SKU Intel is currently producing, featuring only 16 Xe Cores, two fewer than the gaming-oriented B570.

Therefore, these results place the B50 behind the Arc B570 by approximately 15% in OpenCL and 20% in Vulkan, but ahead of the previous Arc Pro GPU, the Pro A50, by more than 40% when compared with the best A50 score we could find on Geekbench. Keep in mind that Geekbench results vary significantly, so direct comparisons are unreasonable when one GPU has multiple runs and the other only has one. Therefore, don't take these synthetic tests at face value.

Regardless, the benchmark was conducted on an instead "normal" setup, suggesting it may have been internally done at a manufacturer rather than in a professional environment where the GPU is actually in use. The configuration consisted of a Colorful CVN X870 Ark Frozen motherboard, running a Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor with 32GB of 6400MT/s DDR5 memory.

Intel’s Arc graphics driver version 32.0.101.6987 introduces a first for the company’s integrated GPUs: manual control over system memory allocation for graphics workloads. "Intel Graphics Software now supports Shared GPU Memory Override control for Built-in Intel Arc GPUs in select Intel Core Ultra Processors (series 1 and 2) in Windows 10 and Windows 11 host systems," the release notes state.

Intel's integrated GPUs use system memory to store working data, rather than a separate GDDR memory pool for graphics and video applications like a discrete GPU does. The maximum amount of memory your computer can use is generally limited to one-half of the system memory, but Intel's new tool lets users override this.

By default, Shared GPU Memory Override is set to 57%. The maximum system RAM you can set to be used as VRAM will depend on how much total system RAM you have; the more overall RAM, the higher the percentage. Intel's example image shows the share could be as high as 87%, and possibly more if you have enough RAM to spare.

To take advantage, all users have to do is move the slider in Intel Graphics Software and reboot their system. According to Intel's Knowledge Base Page, users will need at least 10GB of system RAM and an Intel Core Ultra Processor Series 2 or later (contradicting the release notes, which also denote Series 1).

This kind of control has been more common on AMD platforms, where BIOS-level settings can change VRAM allocation (often capped around 8 GB).

The driver also delivers targeted optimizations. Intel cites up to a six percent performance uplift in the Battlefield 6 Open Beta, Mafia: The Old Country, and Doom: The Dark Ages at 1080p with path tracing enabled on Arc B-series GPUs. Stability improvements include resolving Naraka Bladepoint freezes when Intel XeSS is enabled on Battlemage hardware, alongside power management tuning for Arrow Lake-H laptops. Other changes, like a roughly five percent bump in floating-point throughput and marginally faster Windows 11 UI animations, further round out the update.

While the Shared GPU Memory Override gives enthusiasts more control, over-allocation comes with technical trade-offs. Integrated GPUs use system RAM as part of a unified memory architecture, so allocating excessive VRAM can starve the CPU of working memory, especially in multitasking or memory-bound workloads. In extreme cases, forcing a large static allocation can lead to higher paging activity, increased latency in CPU-bound tasks, and, in laptops, greater power draw from sustained DRAM activity.

This means the setting is best tuned for specific, predictable workloads — like running a game or GPU-accelerated application with known VRAM demands — rather than left maxed out at all times. For instance, if you're experimenting with AI workloads that need lots of memory or want to enable ray tracing inside a demanding title, you could simply allocate more of the shared memory to the GPU for the time being, so that you get smoother performance.

It's hard to believe that it's been a year since we last visited Computex, but here we are again with all the latest and greatest advancements coming from your favorite names in tech. We have Tom's Hardware editors on the ground in Taipei bringing you everything that we see on the show floor (and beyond), which you can peruse in our dedicated Computex 2025 hub.

However, we'll give you a quick rundown of all the goodness announced during "Day Zero" of Computex 2025. As has been the case in recent years at the show, artificial intelligence (AI) weighs heavily on the minds of today's tech giants, and they are leaning heavily on incorporating the technology into nearly everything they make.

Making Waves with AI
When it comes to AI, Nvidia is on the bleeding edge with its accelerators. Nvidia announced its NVLink Fusion program to better use mixed-vendor hardware, allowing its customers and partners to develop custom rack-scale designs. Even though NVLink is a proprietary interlink responsible for facilitating CPU-to-CPU and GPU-to-GPU communications, NVLink Fusion will extend this capability to non-Nvidia hardware from Qualcomm, Fujitsu, Marvell, and MediaTek.

In other news, Nvidia announced it would partner with Foxconn to build a powerful AI supercomputer in Taiwan. The new cluster will feature 10,000 Blackwell GPUs and will have a price tag that will easily stretch into the hundreds of millions of dollars range.

• Nvidia announces NVLink Fusion to allow custom CPUs and AI Accelerators to work with its products
• Nvidia teams up with Foxconn to build an AI supercomputer in Taiwan
• MSI unveils EdgeXpert MS-C931 desktop AI supercomputer powered by Nvidia DGX Spark
• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says 'There's no evidence of any AI chip diversion'
• MSI's $7,000 Vision X AI has a 13-inch AI 'Human Machine Interface' touchscreen embedded into the chassis

Display Technology is Big Business at Computex 2025
We've just grown accustomed to Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync technologies being incorporated into nearly every gaming monitor that launches. However, there's no guarantee that you'll find this variable refresh rate technology in modern televisions. Today, Samsung announced that its 2025 lineup of popular OLED TVs will incorporate both G-Sync and FreeSync Premium Pro support. If that was enough, Samsung is also leaning into the AI side of the equation with a new AI Auto Game Mode, which can automatically scan games to make real-time adjustments to picture and sound settings based on genre.

MSI is adding to a growing field of monitor manufacturers embracing 500 Hz+ panels. While we first saw these ultra-fast monitors with IPS or TN panels, MSI is one of the few using QD-OLED technology. The MPG 271QR QD-OLED X50 is a 1440p monitor with DisplayHDR True Black 500, VESA ClearMR 21000, and a 0.03 ms response time. Like Samsung, MSI is uniquely leveraging AI. The company's AI Care Sensor can detect when a person is not sitting in front of the screen so that it can power down to lessen panel wear and save power.

Acer is blitzed Computex with a slew of new monitors, including several from its Predator, Nitro, and ProCreator product lines. The headliner from Acer is undoubtedly the Predator X27U F5, which features a 500 Hz 1440p panel (likely the same one used in the MSI above).

• Samsung is finally bringing Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro to its OLED TVs
• MSI's new 500 Hz QD-OLED monitor leverages AI tech to save it from burn-in
• Acer showcases ProCreator, Predator, and portable monitors at Computex

New GPUs to the Rescue!
It wouldn't be Computex without putting a spotlight on new gaming GPUs.

In recent years, Intel has decided to rub shoulders with Nvidia and AMD in the discrete GPU market; the latest product from the company is the Arc Pro B-Series, which is aimed at workstations. The Arc Pro B50 is priced at $299 and features 16GB of VRAM, while the $499 Arc Pro B60 will feature 24GB of onboard VRAM and 197 peak TOPS. Taking things to the extreme, Maxsun is slapping two B60 GPUs onto one card called the Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G Turbo. As a result, this dual-GPU monster has 48GB of RAM and could retail for closer to $1,000.

• Intel launches $299 Arc Pro B50 with 16GB of memory, 'Project Battlematrix' workstations with 24GB Arc Pro B60 GPUs
• Maxsun unveils Intel dual-GPU Battlemage graphics card with 48GB GDDR6 to compete with Nvidia and AMD
• Asus unveils Noctua triple-fan RTX 5080, new external GPU dock, and more at Computex
• Asus RTX 5080 ProArt comes with a wood grain finish and M.2 slot option

The Best of the Rest

• Intel demos running Panther Lake systems, touts performance and power efficiency improvements
• AMD B850 Mini ITX motherboard with PCIe slots on both sides teased ahead of Computex
• Asus adds the RTX 5060 to its gaming laptop lineup, tweaks TUF A14 with better cooling

Intel announced the chipmaker's new Arc Pro B50 and Arc Pro B60 at Computex 2025. Maxsun has stitched two of the latter models to produce the Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G Turbo, a dual-GPU solution that provides 48GB of GDDR6 memory designed to address the most challenging AI workloads.

Dual-GPU graphics cards were once popular, but technological advances have made them obsolete. The last consumer-grade dual-GPU graphics card from Nvidia was likely the GeForce GTX Titan Z from 2014, while AMD's was the Radeon Pro Duo from 2016. This means it's been quite a while since chipmakers introduced a dual-GPU product for retail. Although the Arc Pro B60 may not revive the trend, it remains noteworthy since Intel's first foray into the dual-GPU market. Then again, it's an AI graphics card, not a gaming one.

The Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G Turbo essentially combines two Arc Pro B60 graphics cards on one board. It utilizes dual Battlemage BMG-G21 silicon, each accompanied by its own memory. The same silicon powers the Arc B580 but offers double the memory compared to the gaming counterpart.

The GPU inside the Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G Turbo operates according to Intel's reference specifications. It doesn't feature factory overclocks or anything of that sort. Therefore, we're looking at 20 Xe cores, 20 RT units, 160 XMX and 160 Xe vector engines, and a 2,400 MHz clock speed.

Maxsun Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G Turbo Specifications

The Arc Pro B60 has 24GB of GDDR6 memory clocked at 19 GBps—the 192-bit memory interface results in a memory bandwidth of up to 456 GB/s. The biggest selling point is that the Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G Turbo has 48GB of total memory, 50% more than the GeForce RTX 5090 and matching that of the RTX Pro 5000 Blackwell or the Radeon Pro W7900.

With 48GB on one Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G Turbo, users can have multiple graphics cards in a single system to scale the capacity. For example, Intel had a system with two, totaling 96GB, on display. With the correct motherboard, you can easily have four installed for 192GB, akin to Project Battlematrix.

The Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G Turbo is designed to fit into a standard PCIe 5.0 x16 expansion slot; however, there is a catch. Each Arc Pro B60 interacts with your system independently through a bifurcated PCIe 5.0 x8 interface. Thus, it's important to note that the motherboard must support PCIe bifurcation for the PCIe 5.0 slot hosting the Intel Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G Turbo.

Intel has announced its Arc Pro B-series of graphics cards at Computex 2025 in Taipei, Taiwan, with a heavy focus on AI workstation inference performance boosted by segment-leading amounts of VRAM. The Intel Arc Pro B50, a compact card that's designed for graphics workstations, has 16GB of VRAM and will retail for $299, while the larger Intel Arc Pro B60 for AI inference workstations slots in with a copious 24GB of VRAM. While the B60 is designed for powerful 'Project Battlematrix' AI workstations sold as full systems ranging from $5,000 to $10,000, it will carry a roughly $500 per-unit price tag. 

Intel has focused on leveraging the third-party GPU ecosystem to develop its Arc Pro cards, in contrast to its competitors, who tend to release their own-branded cards for the professional segment. That includes partners like Maxsun, which has developed a dual-GPU card based on the B60 GPU. Other partners include ASRock, Sparkle, GUNNR, Senao, Lanner, and Onix. 

Both the B50 and B60 GPUs are now being sampled to Intel partners, as evidenced by a robust display of partner cards and full systems on display, and will arrive on the market in the third quarter of 2025. Intel will initially launch the cards with a reduced software featureset, but will add support for features like SRIOV, VDI, and manageability software in the fourth quarter of the year. 

The Intel Arc Pro B50 has a compact dual-slot design for slim and small-form-factor graphics workstations. It has a 70W total board power (TBP) rating and does not have external power connectors. The GPU wields 16 Xe cores and 128 XMX engines that deliver up to 170 peak TOPS, all fed by 16GB of VRAM that delivers 224 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The card also sports a PCIe 5.0 x8 interface, which Intel credits with speeding transfers from system memory, ultimately delivering 10 to 20% more performance in some scenarios. 

The B50's 16GB of memory outweighs its primary competitors in this segment, which typically come armed with 6 or 8GB of memory. The card also has certified drivers that Intel claims deliver up to 2.6X more performance than the baseline gaming drivers. 

Intel shared a slew of benchmarks against the competing Nvidia RTX A1000 8GB and the previous-gen A50 6GB, but as with all vendor-provided benchmarks, take them with a grain of salt (we included the test notes at the end of the article). In graphics workloads, Intel claims up to a 3.4X advantage over its previous-gen A50, and solid gains across the board against the RTX A1000. It sports similar advantages in a spate of AI inference benchmarks. 

The Intel Arc Pro B60 has 20 Xe cores and 160 XMX engines fed by 24GB of memory that delivers 456 GB/s of bandwidth. The card delivers 197 peak TOPS and fits into a 120 to 200W TBP envelope. This card also comes with a PCIe 5.0 x8 interface.

Intel supports multiple B60 GPUs on a single board, as evidenced by Maxsun's GPU,  with software support in Linux for splitting workloads across both GPUs (each GPU interfaces with the host on its own bifurcated PCIe 5.0 x8 connection). 

Intel's benchmarks again highlighted the advantages of the B60's 24GB of memory vs the competing RTX 200 Ada 16GB and RTX 5060Ti 16GB GPUs, claiming this can impart gains of up to 2.7X over the competition in various AI models. Intel also highlighted the advantages of higher memory capacity in model size, context, and concurrency scaling.

The Intel Arc Pro B60 will primarily come in pre-built inference workstations ranging from $5,000 to $10,000, dubbed Project Battlematrix. The goal is to combine hardware and software to create one cohesive workstation solution. However, the per-unit cost will be in the range of $500 per GPU, depending on the specific model.

Project Battlematrix workstations, powered by Xeon processors, will come with up to eight GPUs, 192GB of total VRAM, and support up to 70B+ parameter models. 

Intel is working to deliver a validated full-stack containerized Linux solution that includes everything needed to deploy a system, including drivers, libraries, tools, and frameworks, that's all performance optimized, allowing customers to hit the ground running with a simple install process. Intel will roll out the new containers in phases as its initiative matures. 

Intel also shared a roadmap of the coming major milestones. The company is currently in the enablement phase, with ISV certification and the first container deployments coming in Q3, eventually progressing to SRIOV, VDI, and manageability software deployment in Q4. 

Intel's partners had multiple Project Battlematrix systems up and running live workloads in the showroom, highlighting that development is already well underway. 

One demo included a system running the full 675B parameter Deepseek model entirely on a single eight-GPU system, with 256 experts running on the CPU and the most frequently used experts running on the GPU. 

Other demos included running and finding bugs in code, an open enterprise platform for building RAGs quickly, and a RAG orchestration demo, among others. 

As noted above, the Intel Arc Pro B50 and Intel Arc Pro B60 will arrive on the market in the third quarter of 2025.

While Intel is gearing up to reveal new Battlemage products at Computex in a few days, X user Haze has shared an image of an Intel ARCade machine featuring a last-generation Alchemist A7 series GPU. Often seen as Intel marketing material for major e-sports events, this machine was reportedly found out of commission and unused at an unnamed Intel campus.

Intel was enthusiastic in the months leading up to the Alchemist launch, as evident in its marketing push for the product. This ranged from custom 60-foot air-conditioned gaming trucks to smaller Arcade machines, like the one we're seeing today. Following the delays associated with Alchemist and inevitable teething problems, Intel has maintained a relatively low profile with Arc since then. The desktop Battlemage launch is proof of this.

The ARCade is an Intel-powered arcade-style machine that has been a recurring presence at events like DreamHack. The controller layout depicts a two-player configuration for fighting games like Street Fighter and Tekken. A quick look inside reveals a GPU at its core, which carries a strong visual resemblance to Intel's Limited Edition models from the Alchemist range, likely the A770. The GPU is presumably housed in an Intel NUC 12 Extreme, but any guess is as good as ours.

It seems that the software divisions at AMD and Intel are setting the stage for their next-generation GPU offerings. The internal codenames for these GPUs, Intel's Xe4 and AMD's GFX13, have been spotted by Kepler and x86isdeadandback at X, as noted by VideoCardz. While this does not allude to the specifications, it shows that both teams are actively pouring resources into the development of their future graphics products.

Intel officially confirmed its fourth-generation Arc GPUs would be codenamed Druid, employing the Xe4 architecture, a while back. The firm has been notably quiet regarding its future GPU roadmap following Alchemist. With limited pre-launch hype, the desktop launch of Battlemage (Xe2) last December was also somewhat of a surprise. That being said, the successor to Battlemage, codenamed Celestial (Xe3), will arrive with Intel's Panther Lake CPUs, which are scheduled for HVM (High Volume Manufacturing) later this year.

Based on employee reports, Celestial has reportedly reached pre-silicon validation, where hardware design flaws are identified and resolved before committing to manufacturing. Tom Peterson's comments support this, stating Celestial's hardware is "baked", with software optimization the remaining task. He also added that the hardware teams have moved on to the next project, Druid (Xe4). Based on commits to the Dawn repository, developers are starting to integrate support for Xe4, which should fall under Intel's Gen15 umbrella.

An AIB is reportedly preparing a dual-GPU variant of Intel's rumored Arc B580 24GB, totalling 48GB of VRAM on a single board, via VideoCardz. According to the source, this model is slated to be revealed at Computex 2025, which is just days away at this point. Specific details like the AIB, interconnect technology, and price are in the dark, but we can expect more details at the trade show, if the rumors are true.

This is the third leak that references a 24GB edition of the Arc B580, following EEC filings from Maxsun and an earlier slip-up from Sparkle. It's quite surprising that a GPU that's supposed to rival the RTX 4060 is getting a 24GB memory configuration. Many PCs don't even possess that much system memory. These cards are intended as a cost-effective solution for AI/ML developers, where similar capacity cards from AMD and Nvidia carry a steeper price tag. The most affordable Blackwell GPU with 24GB of memory is the RTX Pro 4000, costing over $1,500 based on preliminary listings.

An AIB is apparently doubling down on this approach by building a dual-GPU solution, housing two of these rumored 24GB B580 GPUs on a single PCB. Keep in mind, this product is reportedly a one-time design from the AIB, not a standard reference model from Intel.

Traditionally, multi-GPU setups nowadays, like Nvidia's B200 and Apple's M1 Ultra, rely on their own advanced interconnect solutions like NVLink and UltraFusion. While Intel does have Xe Link, it likely isn't compatible with the B580 and would be too costly for a one-off project. The most probable contender is a PCIe bridge linking the GPU's interfaces, allowing them to communicate through one slot.

Just days before Computex, the parent company of Maxsun has registered new Intel Arc B580 models with 24GB of VRAM with the EEC, via Olrak at X, further stoking existing rumors of a high-VRAM Battlemage card. Remember that EEC (Eurasian Economic Commission) submissions aren't definitive confirmations of any product. Manufacturers often register placeholder configurations to cover all future possibilities, many of which never end up seeing the light of day. Therefore, you should treat this leak with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Intel launched its Arc B580 and Arc B570 GPUs in December and January, respectively, bringing its Battlemage architecture to the desktop market just months after Lunar Lake debuted on mobile. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say these GPUs initially caused a stir in the market, offering an ample 12GB framebuffer, a capacity unheard of in the $250 GPU market. The cheapest B580s on Newegg and Best Buy are now in the $300 territory, which is a shame. That's a trend most new GPUs are facing, including AMD's RX 9000 GPUs and Nvidia's RTX 50 series.

We've been hearing rumors of a 24GB Battlemage Professional GPU since December. Recently, Sparkle accidentally alluded to the existence of an Arc B580 24GB, later retracting their comments, likely due to NDA concerns. Maxsun's parent company has registered several GPUs with the EEC, including the MAXSUN Intel Arc B580 iCraft 24G and its OC variant, matching the exact configuration Sparkle mentioned.

Intel has discontinued support for its Deep Link suite of technologies, as confirmed by a representative on GitHub, via X user Haze. After Intel quietly stopped promoting the feature in newer products such as Battlemage, it has now confirmed that active development for Deep Link has ceased. While you still might be able to use Deep Link, Intel has clarified that there will be no future updates or official support from their customer service channels.

Deep Link was introduced in late 2020. It allows you to harness the combined power of your Intel CPU and Arc GPU to improve streaming, AI acceleration, and overall efficiency. To utilize Deep Link, you needed an Intel 11th, 12th, or 13th Generation CPU and a dedicated Arc Alchemist GPU. The suite offered four key utilities: Dynamic Power Share, Stream Assist, Hyper Encode, and Hyper Compute.

Dynamic Power Share optimizes performance and power by intelligently shifting power resources between the CPU and GPU. Stream Assist improved streaming by offloading the task from the dedicated GPU to the integrated GPU. Hyper Encode accelerated video encoding using multiple Intel processors. Lastly, Hyper Compute leveraged your Intel CPU and GPU to accelerate AI workloads in OpenVINO.

Nvidia just confirmed that it’s withholding pre-release drivers from reviewers for the RTX 5060, which will rival the best graphics cards. According to Dutch publication Tweakers.net [machine translated], the company said that it will only make the drivers for the mainstream graphics card available on May 19, the card's release date.

Many reviewers already have the GPU in their labs and test benches, but they still haven’t received the pre-release drivers typically included in the review kit. Several publications that usually receive these pre-release drivers have taken to social media and their respective pages to say they still haven’t gotten the required software to run what would be Nvidia’s most affordable RTX 50-series (codenamed Blackwell) GPU.

Team Green finally confirmed this to Tweakers.net, who said that it will only make the RTX 5060 drivers available on the day of release. This means that the tech media won’t be able to test the GPU until May 19 and publish their results after it goes on sale.

Intel is gearing up to launch new Arc professional GPUs, with a recent teaser strongly suggesting these will be based on the firm's latest Battlemage (Xe2) architecture. Set to debut at Computex, these GPUs should, at minimum, offer a slight increase in memory capacities. Specifications and other technical details remain unknown, but we can expect to learn more from Intel at Taipei.

Intel's Battlemage family currently employs one die, BMG-G21, powering both the Arc B570 and Arc B580 GPUs. Rumors have alluded to several other configurations, with the most persistent being a larger BMG-G31 die, which has surfaced numerous times in shipping manifests. The majority of these shipments are destined for Vietnam, which is home to several OSAT companies that assemble, package, and test silicon. Export data alone isn't enough to confirm whether a BMG-G31-based SKU is still being developed, so we're treating this with significant skepticism.

Rumors of Battlemage-based professional cards with 24GB of VRAM have been afloat since last December. Likewise, a recent slip-up from an OEM indicated that Intel had a 24GB B580 model in the pipeline. If we put two and two together, at least one GPU from the Battlemage professional lineup is expected to employ the BMG-G21 die with twelve 16Gb GDDR6 modules arranged in a clamshell configuration. Other specifications should remain largely similar to the Arc B580.

Intel has announced that its AI-powered upscaling tech XeSS (Xe Super Sampling) is now available in over 200 games, while the newer XeSS 2 has been added to 10 more titles. As promised, the new Assassin’s Creed: Shadows and Civilization VII are getting support for XeSS 2 alongside popular titles including Naraka Bladepoint, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, and Delta Force: Black Hawk Down.

Notably, Intel lists a total of 13 XeSS 2-enabled games on its website, however, according to PC Gaming Wiki, it is supported in over 20 titles. Introduced alongside the Arc B580 and B570 GPUs late last year, XeSS 2 offered support for only a handful of games up until today. Leveraging the Battlemage architecture, XeSS 2 combines upscaling, frame generation, and latency reduction to compete with rival technologies like Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR. As of now XeSS 2 is fully compatible with only Intel’s Arc A-series and B-series discrete GPUs and integrated graphics found in newer Intel Core Ultra processors.

In its announcement, Intel also shared some performance data using its Arc B580 GPU to showcase the capabilities of XeSS 2. According to the company, Diablo IV saw up to a 4x increase in frame rates, jumping from 46 FPS at 1440p native resolution to 186 FPS using XeSS 2. Similarly, games like Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, Delta Force: Black Hawk Down, Hogwarts Legacy, and F1 24 witnessed over 2x improvements in performance.

Die shots of Intel’s Arrow Lake architecture have been published, revealing Intel’s chiplet (tile) infused design in all of its glory. Andreas Schiling on X shared several images of Arrow Lake up close, revealing the layout of Arrow Lake’s individual tiles and the layout of the cores inside the compute tile.

The first photo exposes the full die of Intel’s desktop Core Ultra 200S series CPUs, with the compute tile on the upper left, the IO tile on the bottom, and the SoC tile and GPU tile on the right. To the bottom left and top right are two filler dies designed to provide structural rigidity.

The compute die is fabbed on TSMC’s bleeding-edge N3B node, with a total area of 117.241 mm². The IO tile and SoC tile are fabbed on TSMC’s older N6 node, with the IO tile measuring 24.475mm squared and the SoC tile 86.648mm squared. All of the tiles rest on an underlying base tile fabbed on Intel’s 22nm FinFET node. Arrow Lake is the first Intel architecture that is fabricated entirely using nodes from a competitor, except for the base tile.

The next image shows all of the sub-components for the secondary tiles in Arrow Lake. The I/O die houses the Thunderbolt 4 controller/display PHY, PCIe Express buffers/PHYs, and TBT4 PHYs. The SoC tile houses the display engines, media engine, more PCIe PHYs, buffers, and the DDR5 memory controllers. The GPU tile houses four Xe GPU cores and an Xe LPG (Arc Alchemist) render slice.

The final image shows off Intel’s latest core configuration for Arrow Lake, which differs from previous hybrid Intel architectures. For Arrow Lake, Intel opted to sandwich the E-cores between the P-cores rather than putting them all in their own cluster, allegedly to reduce thermal hotspots. Four of the eight P-cores reside on the borders of the die with the other four residing in the middle of the die. The four E-core clusters (which house four cores each) are sandwiched between the outer and inner P-cores.

Schilling’s die shot also exposes the cache layout for Arrow Lake, comprised of 3MB of L3 cache per P-core (36MB in total) and 3MB of L2 cache per E-core cluster, with 1.5MB shared between two cores directly. An interconnect bridges the two L2 cache clusters (and their associated cores) together, which is also responsible for connecting each core cluster to the ring agent. One major upgrade Intel made with Arrow Lake is connecting the E-core clusters to L3 cache shared by the P-cores, effectively giving the E-cores an L3 cache.

Arrow Lake is one of Intel’s most complex architectures to date and the first from the company to bring a chiplet-style design to the desktop market. That said, Intel’s first attempt at a desktop chiplet-based competitor has not been well received, due to latency issues from the interconnect, which is responsible for connecting all the tiles together. Intel is attempting to rectify the issue through firmware updates. Still, its current implementation can’t touch AMD’s competing Ryzen 9000 CPUs (such as the 9800X3D), nor is it enough to even beat its own previous-generation 14th-generation processors in gaming (such as the 14900K).

All that said, moving to a chiplet approach will afford Intel more ways to optimize its architectures down the road, in a more efficient manner. Each tile can be developed independently of others and built with different nodes to improve yields, optimize development, and reduce production costs.

Intel’s next-generation Xe3 Celestial GPU reportedly enters the pre-silicon validation stage, when the GPU design and architecture are being tested using software models and emulators. The chip giant conducts this testing with OEMs and independent BIOS vendors so that they can catch issues before committing actual silicon. X user Haze spotted this development and saw some details related to Celestial in the LinkedIn profiles of some Intel employees.

One profile listed “Celestial discrete GPU Pcode IP model development” as one of theresponsibilities, detailing it as “Developed pre-silicon HW modeling for power management IP in Intel Xe3 architecture for discrete GPU Celestial team (C/C++)” and “Mapped 13% of boot/reboot signal pathways for functional pcode in Celestial power management IP model (fmodel), migrating those modeled in Ruby from the test environment to C/C++ in the IP model.”

Another person said they “developed low-level system software and device drivers in C++ for Intel’s Nova Lake & Xeon6 (Diamond Rapids) CPUs and Celestial discrete GPU.”

It seems that the pre-silicon model already has its firmware and power management ready, allowing Intel’s partners to start testing it virtually with their systems. Once every kink has been ironed out and is confirmed to be working as intended, the Xe3 design can proceed to tapeout, the final step before fabrication begins.

The latest Steam Hardware survey from April shows Nvidia’s RTX 50 series GPUs making their first appearance almost four months after launch. Conversely, despite their apparent retail popularity, AMD’s RX 9000 GPUs are nowhere to be found on the list. While the absence of RDNA 4 is confusing, it might all boil down to a lack of adequate supply at MSRP.

The April Steam Hardware survey reflects a return to normality after the previous survey was skewed by an unexplained surge of Chinese users, knocking several statistics off the charts. Typical figures for operating systems, system specifications, and CPU/GPU vendor, among others, remained unchanged. Nvidia still reigns supreme in the GPU market with a 74.39% share, while Intel leads the CPU arena at 60.35%, closely followed by AMD.

Several new GPUs have gained traction among gamers, per the Steam Hardware survey, including Nvidia’s RTX 5080 (0.38%), RTX 5070 Ti (0.28%), and RTX 5070 (0.38%). The RTX 5090 being excluded from this list is self-explanatory, as that GPU is far out of the reach of the average user. After exhaustively searching the list, we found no GPU from AMD’s RX 9070 family. That’s quite telling since this has recently been one of AMD’s most successful GPU launches, coupled with Nvidia’s many shortfalls this generation.

There is a new AMD GPU on the survey, though — new to the survey statistics, at least. AMD's RX 7800 XT appears for the first time in the April 2025 figures, landing at 0.27% (the same as the 5070 Ti). The RX 7900 XT, 7900 GRE, 7600 XT, and 7600 all remain missing in action, along with virtually all Intel Arc GPUs (other than the integrated "Arc Graphics" that sits unchanged month-to-month at 0.22%).

Intel just released a graphics driver update that reportedly improves FPS performance by around 10% for Intel Core 200V (Lunar Lake) chips. According to Intel Gaming Access, Intel graphics driver 32.0.101.6734 optimizes the CPU’s power management, which allows the integrated Intel Arc 140V and 130V GPUs to deliver better performance while remaining at their default power setting of 17 watts.

The company tested the update on the MSI Claw 8 AI+ with nine different titles, and the results were promising. More than just the 10% uplift in FPS, the new driver also increased the 1% lows by 25%, making for much smoother gameplay. Intel said that it set the games at 1080p Medium quality during the tests, while the handheld console was at its default 17W TDP. These are the results that the chip maker published for each game:

Expanding its wings into the automotive ecosystem, Intel shared its upcoming SDV (Software-Defined Vehicle) SoC designs at Auto Shanghai 2025 yesterday. Slated to be the industry's first disaggregated design, the company presented its second-generation SDV SoC, internally codenamed Frisco Lake. A detailed investigation by 3elife, a Chinese tech and news publication, purports these SoCs are derivatives of Intel's Panther Lake design, with their successor allegedly based on Nova Lake.

Software-defined vehicles are automobiles where a majority of the functionality is handled through software, rather than traditional physical, mechanical, or electronic components. Compared to desktops, x86 has seen limited adoption in the automotive industry, primarily due to stringent power consumption requirements, real-time processing demands, and safety and security concerns.

However, as ADAS, autonomous driving, in-car experiences, and the need for high-performance computing in vehicles grow, Intel is positioning itself to gain traction in this market. Last year, the company released the 225W Arc A760A, offering a PC-like experience from the comfort of your car. The Raptor-Lake-based Malibou Lake platform represents Intel's latest SDV offering, featuring up to 14 cores (6P+8E), 24MB L3 cache, 96 EUs, and support for eight cameras, slated for a Q4 2024 launch.

Yesterday, Intel shared several slides detailing Frisco Lake, officially poised to deliver 10 times better AI performance and 61% higher efficiency than current offerings, presumably Malibou Lake. In addition, the inclusion of an Xe3 (Celestial) graphics IP block strongly suggests these SoCs are indeed derived from Panther Lake, a connection that is supported by the source and kernel patches (via Harukaze at X). The use of Intel's flagship 18A process node and the jump from Raptor Cove to Cougar Cove (rumored) would explain the sharp spike in efficiency.

That's not all, as 3elife secured an alleged roadmap detailing Intel's future product offerings from a third party. Assuming this timeline is accurate, Frisco Lake was never actually intended for launch and appears to be a last-minute addition to Intel's product stack. Apparently, Malibou Lake was in line to be superseded by Grizzly Lake, which is now expected to serve as Intel's third-generation SDV SoC design.

Under the Grizzly Lake lineup, the leaked slides mention an SoC codenamed Monument Peak, reportedly offering up to 32 cores, a 7 TFLOPS-capable Xe-based integrated GPU, slated for the first half of 2027. This time frame coincides with Nova Lake, and one rumored configuration of that architecture includes 32 efficient cores (16P+32E+4LPE), likely based on the Arctic Wolf microarchitecture.

So, if these rumors hold true, Intel is porting its consumer-grade architectures to the automotive industry with a one-year cadence. Considering the extensive validation processes and typically long lifecycles of these chips, automobiles usually don't opt for the most cutting-edge core design, unlike the desktop market. It's hard to say what the future holds, but perhaps Intel's limited success in the mobile phone and AI markets might be a catalyst for this drive to establish a strong foothold in the automotive domain.

The GPU rumor mill has been spinning like crazy this morning. The whole thing kicked off when Sparkle's Bilibili account supposedly confirmed the existence of a 24GB variant of the Intel Arc B580 (via ITHome). A media manager also alluded to a potential release window between May and June. But this was short-lived as Sparkle has officially retracted these comments. Perhaps this is a move to manage fallout after a potential NDA breach? It's hard to say for certain, but this isn't the first time we've heard of a 24GB spinoff of Battlemage.

Intel officially introduced its Arc Battlemage GPU lineup in December of last year. From this family, the Intel Arc B570 and Arc B580 were crafted using the mid-range BMG-G21 die, featuring a 192-bit interface for six memory channels. Shipping documents have suggested the existence of alternate BMG-G31 and BMG-G10 variants, likely for the B700 and B300 families, but Intel has not made any official confirmation yet.

This slip-up seemingly corroborates existing rumor, positioning this GPU under Intel's Arc Pro family, succeeding existing Alchemist-based Flex or Pro-series options, for AI applications. From what we can gather, Intel is allegedly deploying the BMG-G21 die, the same as the B580, with 24GB of memory configured using 12x 16Gb modules in clamshell mode. That's a twofold increase in memory capacity over Intel's current Arc Pro A60 offering.

Architecturally speaking, Battlemage is one generation behind Nvidia and AMD. For tasks demanding raw compute muscle, this Arc B580 24GB, or whatever Intel ends up naming it, will probably not land blows against Nvidia's Blackwell PRO or AMD's upcoming Radeon PRO W9000 GPUs. These can, however, compete in AI training and inference, which necessitate a lot of VRAM in cases like Large Language Models (LLMs), and image/video generation models like Stable Diffusion.

The economics don't favor Intel if they were to create a higher-end GPU. At similar die sizes, Intel's PPA (Performance Per Area) and architectural shortcomings become apparent: the B580 at 272mm² (using N5) is priced at $249, while Nvidia sells its RTX 5070, which uses a 263mm² die (using N4P) at $549. While N4P wafers might be pricier than N5 (likely not double), that's still a small consideration.

Either way, Sparkle's seeming confirmation, followed by a swift retraction, suggests there's potentially more beneath the surface. If this GPU does exist, we can expect to hear more from Intel at Computex, where we might also get an early look at Panther Lake, similar to how Lunar Lake was unveiled last year.

Lvmin Zhang at GitHub, in collaboration with Maneesh Agrawala at Stanford University, has introduced FramePack this week. FramePack offers a practical implementation of video diffusion using fixed-length temporal context for more efficient processing, enabling longer and higher-quality videos. A 13-billion parameter model built using the FramePack architecture can generate a 60-second clip with just 6GB of video memory.

FramePack is a neural network architecture that uses multi-stage optimization techniques to enable local AI video generation. At the time of writing, the FramePack GUI is said to run a custom Hunyuan-based model under the hood, though the research paper mentions that existing pre-trained models can be fine-tuned using FramePack.

Typical diffusion models process data from previously generated noisy frames to predict the next, slightly less noisy frame. The number of input frames considered for each prediction is called the temporal context length, which grows with the video size. Standard video diffusion models demand a large VRAM pool, with 12GB being a common starting point. Sure, you can get away with less memory, but that comes at the cost of shorter clips, lower quality, and longer processing times.

Enter FramePack: a new architecture that compresses input frames, based on their importance, into a fixed-size context length, drastically reducing GPU memory overhead. All frames must be compressed to converge at a desired upper bound for the context length. The authors describe the computational costs as similar to image diffusion.

The Intel Arc B580 is considered the cheapest modern GPU on the market today, with Tom’s Hardware considering it the $249 GPU champion. However, several reviewers discovered that the budget GPU performs poorly on older processors. Intel has acknowledged the issue and will investigate it.

A moderator on the Intel Community forum started an Intel Arc Graphics and CPU Overhead thread, saying, “Thank you for your patience. We are aware of reports of performance sensitivity in some games when paired with older generation processors. We have increased our platform coverage to include more configurations in our validation process, and we are continuing to investigate optimizations.”

Reviewers first noticed the issue in early January, when they tested the Intel Arc B580 on older and newer CPUs. For example, Hardware Unboxed ran some gaming benchmarks with the GPU using an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and a Ryzen 5 2600. It also used an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 as a control, and these are its results.

GPU Benchmarks Introduction

Tom's Hardware exhaustively benchmarks every GPU to find out which are worthy of our list of the best graphics cards. Our GPU benchmarks hierarchy ranks current and previous generation graphics cards by performance. Whether it's playing games, running artificial intelligence workloads, or doing professional video editing, your graphics card typically plays the biggest role in determining performance — even the best CPUs for gaming take a secondary role.

Our 2026 GPU Hierarchy testing spans three generations of Nvidia and AMD graphics cards, as well as Intel's Arc B-series GPUs.

Our testing has been made easier by the fact that no truly new gaming GPUs have been introduced in almost a year. If you haven't already upgraded your graphics card after the GeForce RTX 50-series and Radeon RX 9000-series launches in 2025, well, you're still looking at the exact same products now.

AMD did make its formerly China-only Radeon RX 9070 GRE available globally after Computex 2026, but in our review, we found that $549 product to be too expensive given the level of performance it delivers and the compromises made to hit its price point. Check out that coverage for all the details.

Most of the products we recommend remain at elevated prices compared to their MSRPs, but this is just life in mid-2026. It's admittedly cold comfort, but unless you're shopping for an RTX 5090, graphics card prices haven't risen much more than they already did earlier this year.

Compared to the doubling or tripling of prices we've seen for RAM kits and SSDs in 2026 versus last year, a GPU upgrade remains a relatively affordable (and self-contained) option, either as a boost for an existing PC or part of an all-new parts list.

Let's dive into our ranking of GPUs past and present so you can figure out how all those cards stack up.

Our full GPU hierarchy using traditional rendering (aka rasterization) comes first, and below that we have our separate ray tracing hierarchy. We've also mashed up these results into one overarching ranking for the complete pictures.

The results are all collected at native resolution, without enabling DLSS, FSR, or XeSS upscaling or frame generation.

As a brief refresher of the cards in this version of our hierarchy, Nvidia's cutting-edge Blackwell architecture and its DLSS 4 suite of tech upgrades the quality of both upscaling and ray reconstruction on RTX 50-series GPUs. It also adds Multi Frame Generation support. As of mid-2026, MFG can add anywhere from one to five AI-generated frames in between natively rendered ones.

Even if you're not into framegen, DLSS 4.5 upscaling and its transformer neural network architecture can offer a big boost in image quality at the same output resolution compared to earlier DLSS versions. That tech can benefit all GeForce RTX GPUs going back to the RTX 20-series, albeit at a heavier performance cost on older hardware compared to earlier DLSS versions.

Nvidia's Ada Lovelace architecture powers its prior-gen RTX 40-series cards. Ada introduced DLSS Frame Generation, which can double output frame rates in supported games. Ada cards don't benefit from MFG, though.

AMD's Radeon RX 9000 series cards, powered by its latest RDNA 4 architecture, get a big boost to both ray-tracing and AI capabilities with dedicated RT and matrix math accelerators. AMD uses those capabilities to enable its FSR 4 upscaler and its much-improved image quality in a small but growing range of titles, whether through native support or with driver-level overrides.

The FSR Redstone update last year brought ML Frame Generation to RX 9000-series cards. Like FSR 4.x upscaling, ML Frame Generation can be directly integrated in games or enabled through a driver override.

Meanwhile, the last-gen RDNA 3 architecture powers seven RX 7000-series seven desktop cards. Until very recently, RX 7000-series cards couldn't officially run FSR 4 upscaling, but an official version of that tech will be made available for those cards in July 2026.

Intel's Battlemage-powered Arc B580 and Arc B570 offer major improvements in performance and efficiency compared to its Alchemist architecture. Battlemage only serves the entry-level end of the graphics card market today. Intel introduced a larger Battlemage chip in the form of the Arc Pro B70 earlier this year, but that product is intended for AI and professional visualization, and it's priced like it.

On page two, you'll find our 2025-2026 test data for posterity. Page three has our 2024–2022 benchmark suite, which covers previous-generation GPUs running an older test suite and a Core i9-12900K. Page four has an even older 2020–2021 test suite with only raster games, running on a Core i9-9900K testbed. The legacy tables are no longer being actively updated. There's also the "Ancient Legacy GPU hierarchy" (without benchmarks, sorted by theoretical performance) for reference purposes.

The following tables sort everything solely by our performance-based GPU benchmarks, from fastest to slowest. Factors including real-world pricing, graphics card power consumption, overall efficiency, and features aren't factored into the rankings here. The latest results use an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D testbed. Here are the tables and benchmark results — rasterization games first, then ray tracing games, and finally the content creation results.

GPU Benchmarks Hierarchy 2026: The tests

For our latest GPU benchmarks, we test every card at a mix of high and ultra settings, depending on the game. We test across three resolutions: 1080p, 1440p, and 4K.

All the scores are expressed as percentages relative to the top-ranking 1080p ultra card, which is of course the GeForce RTX 5090.

Our 2026 test suite comprises the following games. 11 are raster titles, and of those, four have RT support. We test another four games that either require RT to run (DOOM: The Dark Ages and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle) or look best with RT (Assassin's Creed Shadows and Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced.)

• Black Myth Wukong (+RT)
• Alan Wake II (+RT)
• Apex Legends
• Counter-Strike 2
• Fortnite
• Arc Raiders
• Stalker 2
• DOOM: The Dark Ages (RT required)
• Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced (RT only)
• Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (+RT)
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (RT required)
• Marvel Rivals
• Assassin's Creed Shadows (RT only)
• Cyberpunk 2077 (+RT)
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

GPU Benchmarks Hierarchy 2026: Raster gaming

The FPS score is the geometric mean (equal weighting) of all 11 games. Note that the specifications column links directly to our original review for the various GPUs.

Rasterization GPU Benchmarks, Key Findings

• Unsurprisingly, the RTX 5090 takes the top spot across the board, but prices remain stratospheric in mid-2026. It's also difficult to fully engage the GB202 GPU for pure raster gaming unless you're playing at 4K.
• Among current cards, the RX 9060 XT 8GB and RTX 5060 duke it out for the best performance per dollar at 1080p.
• The Radeon RX 9070 is the 1440p raster value champ. The recently introduced RX 9070 GRE sits just behind, and the RTX 5070 is a somewhat distant third.
• At 4K, the RX 9070 XT is the cheapest way to get into 4K 60 FPS native gaming. But the RX 9070 and RTX 5070 are also strong options among current GPUs if you're willing to enable a dash of upscaling.

Overall, if you're only interested in native raster gaming, Radeons are a strong choice in 2026. But Nvidia offers superior DLSS 4.5 upscaling and Multi Frame Generation support across all RTX 50-series cards, which makes matching your GPU's performance to your monitor's refresh rate a snap.

FSR 4.x upscaling isn't on par with DLSS 4.5 yet, and FSR ML Frame Generation is limited to a 2x framerate boost where it's available.

Rasterization GPU Benchmarks Rankings 2026

Remember that we're not including any upscaling or framegen results in the above table. DLSS, FSR, and XeSS offer differing image quality, and we want to keep things directly comparable.

Don't buy any of the cards at the top of our hierarchy without a high-refresh-rate 2560x1440 or 4K monitor to match. Even one of our best gaming CPUs, like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, can only do so much when a powerful card becomes CPU-bound.

In general, if you're still running a 60 Hz fixed-refresh-rate monitor, it's entirely possible that you're not seeing all the frames your graphics card can generate. Practically any current-gen graphics card from the RTX 5060 on up is good enough for high-refresh-rate gaming at 1080p in 2026 even without upscaling or framegen, and the RTX 5070 or RX 9070 will give you the same experience at 1440p.

In this era of upscaling and framegen, a high-resolution monitor is no longer an obstacle to the best gaming experience. Upscalers work best with higher-than-1080p output resolutions, and the advent of the DLSS 4.5 upscaling model especially means that you can get both smooth performance and crisp image quality from surprisingly modest graphics cards.

But if you don't have a high-refresh-rate 1440p or 4K monitor to begin with, you can't take full advantage of the free boost to both performance and image quality that AI-powered upscaling offers, nor can you enjoy the full smoothness boost of framegen. Check out our list of the best gaming monitors for a potential upgrade if you're still rocking a 1080p 60 Hz display from the 2010s.

On to our 2026 raster results. Among currently available graphics cards, Blackwell rules the top three spots. The RX 9070 XT ends up fourth, just behind the potent (but much more expensive, as of June 2026) RTX 5070 Ti.

Moving into the midrange, the RX 9070's strong raster performance gives it the edge over the RTX 5070, but it's close. And the 5070 has the full arsenal of DLSS 4.5 features at its disposal in virtually every modern game.

Given the image quality and smoothness advantage of DLSS 4.5 upscaling and MFG, the 5070 got the nod in our most recent round of best graphics card picks after our 2026 retests.

The recently introduced RX 9070 GRE lands between the 5070 and the lower-end 5060 Ti and 9060 XT, a position for which Nvidia has no current-gen answer (and no easy path to one.) But AMD may have priced the GRE too high at $549, and we're already seeing big price drops on that product that might make it uniquely appealing in a market where the RTX 5060 Ti is its direct price competition.

The formerly midrange RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is hopelessly overpriced for the performance it offers in mid-2026, and the formerly somewhat affordable 8GB model is also selling for elevated prices now, making the entire 5060 Ti family impossible to recommend.

The RX 9060 XT 16GB holds down the entry-midrange 16GB position by itself, and its $459 price tag isn't so absurd as to make it un-recommendable. But as RX 9070 GREs start going on sale for $500-ish, the step up is going to look mighty tempting.

As we move further down the stack, the $300-ish Arc B580 represents Intel's best card right now, but it remains very much a budget part in mid-2026, trading blows with the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 4060. The only reason it lands as high as it does in our results is that its 12GB of VRAM prevents its performance from totally plummeting at 4K, as it does for those older 8GB cards.

The RTX 5060 is 24% faster than the Arc B580 at 1080p and 17% faster at 1440p, and its prices are proportionately higher. The scarce RX 9060 XT 8GB is a whole 30% faster at 1080p and 23% faster at 1440p, for similarly more money.

We don't think the potential longevity afforded by the B580's 12GB of VRAM is worth the massive performance tradeoff versus current-gen 8GB GPUs. Save up a few more bucks and grab an RTX 5060 or RX 9060 8GB instead (and enjoy the more widely adopted DLSS 4.5 or FSR 4 versus XeSS while you're at it).

The $250 Arc B570 is still a good value in mid-2026, and as the only modern, decent graphics card available for (well) under $300, it's still worth a look if you can't stretch to an RTX 5050. But recent software ills that took months to fix have led us to consider it more of a gamble than a product worthy of a recommendation, even though those issues did eventually get corrected.

Ray Tracing GPU Benchmarks 2026

For 2026, we're testing a range of RT titles that present a progressively more difficult workload to the GPUs under test.

Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced, DOOM: The Dark Ages, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are all relatively lightweight RT titles that will run on a wide range of RT-ready hardware. Spider-Man 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Assassin's Creed Shadows represent greater challenges to compute resources, VRAM, or both. And Black Myth Wukong and Alan Wake II still bring even the most powerful graphics cards to their knees at native resolutions.

Our results for those more demanding games represent more of a jumping-off point for upscaling and framegen rather than native performance. But lighter RT titles mean that you can explore the differences in image quality that ray tracing offers without crushing your GPU flat.

In any case, graphics cards at the top of our RT tests are ready for practically any RT game. But as you'll see, that's still quite the high bar to clear in 2026.

Ray Tracing GPU Benchmarks, Key Findings and Notes

• The RTX 5090 really comes into its own with RT enabled, as expected.
• AMD's RX 9070 XT outperforms the RX 7900 XTX in our RT tests, showing that the ray-tracing improvements in RDNA 4 deliver.
• Even with those improvements, the RX 9070 XT can only manage a tie with the RTX 4070 Ti with RT in play, coming in eighth place overall.
• Maintaining 60 FPS in RT titles (as a good foundation for upscaling and framegen enhancements) is a very tall order. Among recent products, you'll want:
  • an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, RTX 5070, or RX 9070 GRE to handle ~60 FPS RT at 1080p without running out of VRAM
  • An RTX 4070, an RTX 5070 or RX 9070 at 1440p, or an RX 9070 XT or RTX 5070 Ti for the best possible experience
  • An RTX 5080, RTX 4090, or RTX 5090 at 4K

Ray Tracing GPU Benchmarks Rankings 2026

The RTX 5090 and RTX 4090 lead our RT results. But if you want to enjoy high-end RT without a 4090- or 5090-sized bankroll, the RTX 5070 Ti proves itself as the last card with a reasonable price-to-performance ratio before things get crazy.

The 5070 Ti leads the RX 9070 XT by a wide margin in our RT tests, and it's anywhere from 10%-15% behind the absurdly overpriced RTX 5080 across the board. But if you want the absolute best RT performance possible without stepping up to a 4090 or 5090, the extra cash for a 5080 is your best — and only — option.

That said, you should really explore DLSS 4.5 upscaling and MFG on the 5070 Ti before spending big to step up to a 5080.

The RX 9070 XT remains AMD's fastest RT GPU, outpacing the 7900 XTX across all tested resolutions. It leads the RDNA 3 halo card by about 10% across the board, which is an impressive generational leap considering its 33% deficit in CUs versus the XTX.

But the 9070 XT can only trade blows with the RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 5070 with Nvidia competition in the picture. It beats out the 5070 at 1080p and 1440p, but DLSS 4.5 upscaling and MFG give Blackwell gamers more flexible options for boosting performance with only minimal impact to image quality versus both RDNA 4 (and Ada).

Of course, the RX 9070 XT has FSR 4 upscaling and framegen at its disposal in compatible titles, but support for those features isn't as widespread as DLSS.

Meanwhile, the RX 9070 comes in slightly behind the RTX 5070 at 1080p and 1440p for RT. Even though its 16GB of VRAM prevents the 9070's 4K RT performance from completely nosediving, the average frame rate at that resolution isn't high enough to make it a 4K RT choice.

At 1080p, the RX 9070 GRE presents an intriguing RT option for Radeon gamers, delivering a near-60-FPS average baseline that would make a great FSR 4 foundation. But its 12GB of VRAM quickly becomes a liability at 1440p versus the 9070, and 4K is out of the question.

Overall, our demanding 2026 RT test suite shows that the bar for entry to a good RT experience remains high, especially as elevated prices on the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB mean that the first "real" RT-ready Blackwell card at 1080p and up is the RTX 5070. And on the Radeon side, you really want an RX 9070 GRE or RX 9070 for the best experience.

Test Setup and Hardware for GPU Benchmarks

We've used several different PCs for our testing over the years. The latest update switches to an AMD Zen 5 processor: the unparalleled Ryzen 7 9800X3D and its 3D V-Cache-enhanced performance.

Here are the specifications for our latest GPU test PC.

Tom's Hardware 2026 GPU Benchmarks Testbed

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
CPU Cooler: Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 SE
Memory: G.Skill Trident Z5 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5-6000 CL30
Motherboard: Asus TUF Gaming X670E-Plus Wifi
SSD: Inland Performance Plus 4TB
PSU: MSI MPG Ai1600TS 1600W

We test across the three most common gaming resolutions, 1080p, 1440p, and 4K, using a mix of high and ultra settings, depending on the title. Where possible, we use 'reference' cards for all of these tests, like Nvidia's Founders Edition models and AMD's reference designs. Most midrange and lower GPUs don't get reference models, however, and in some cases we only have factory-overclocked cards for testing. We do our best to select cards that are close to the reference specs in such cases.

For each graphics card, we follow the same testing procedure. We run one pass of each benchmark to "warm up" the GPU after launching the game, then perform our actual test runs across each resolution.

We carefully review our test data and check for anomalies. For example, we always expect the RTX 5080 to be faster than the RTX 5070 Ti. If it's not, and we're not in a CPU limited situation, we'll recheck both cards to ensure that our standings our accurate. We also check and retest in cases of subtler issues, as when a transient hitch or frame-time spike causes a large dip in 1% low FPS.

Due to the length of time required for testing each GPU, updated drivers and game patches inevitably come out that can impact performance. We periodically retest a few sample cards to verify our results are still valid, and if not, we go through and retest the affected game(s) and GPU(s). We may also add games to our test suite over time, if one comes out that is popular and conducive to testing. See what makes a good game benchmark for our selection criteria.

GPU Benchmarks: Individual Game Charts

The above tables provide a summary of performance, but for those that want to see the individual game charts, for both the standard and ray tracing test suites, we've got those as well. These charts only cover current-gen GPUs for readability.

These charts are up to date as of June 2026.

GPU Benchmarks — 1080p

GPU Benchmarks — 1440p

GPU Benchmarks — 4K

GPU Benchmarks — Power, Clocks, and Temperatures

Most of our discussion has focused on performance, but for those interested in power and other aspects of the GPUs, here are the appropriate charts. We'll run these from highest to lowest settings, as 4K ultra tends to be the most strenuous workload on most of these GPUs.

If you're looking for the legacy GPU hierarchy, head over to page two! We moved it to a separate page to help improve load times in our CMS as well as for the main website. And if you're looking to comment on the GPU benchmarks hierarchy, head over to our forums and join the discussion!

Choosing a Graphics Card

Choosing a Graphics Card

Choosing a Graphics Card

Which graphics card do you need? To help you decide, we created this GPU benchmarks hierarchy, comprising 48 GPUs from three generations of hardware for Nvidia and AMD and also including Intel's Battlemage cards. Not surprisingly, the fastest cards are using the latest GPU architectures, though they're not always a major upgrade over the prior generation.

Of course, it's not just about playing games. Many applications use the GPU for other work. But a good graphics card for gaming will typically do equally well in complex GPU computational workloads. Buy one of the top cards and you can run games at high resolutions and frame rates with the effects turned all the way up, and you'll be able to do content creation work as needed. Drop down to the middle and lower portions of the list and you'll need to start dialing down the settings to get acceptable performance in regular gameplay and GPU benchmarks.

If your main goal is gaming, you can't forget about the CPU. Getting the best possible gaming GPU won't help you much if your CPU is underpowered or many years out of date. So be sure to check out the Best CPUs for gaming page, as well as our CPU Benchmarks Hierarchy to make sure you have the right CPU for the level of gaming performance you're looking to achieve.

And don't forget about your monitor. Be sure to get a display whose refresh rate range matches the average frame rates of the graphics card that you want in the games that you play. Check out our list of the best gaming monitors for a starting point.

GPU Benchmarks from 2022–2024

Our 'legacy' GPU benchmarks used different hardware. Here are the details for the 2022–2024 configuration that used an Alder Lake 12900K CPU.

Tom's Hardware 2022–2024 GPU Testbed

Intel Core i9-12900K
MSI Pro Z690-A WiFi DDR4
Corsair 2x16GB DDR4-3600 CL16
Crucial P5 Plus 2TB
Cooler Master MWE 1250 V2 Gold
Cooler Master PL360 Flux
Cooler Master HAF500
Windows 11 Pro 64-bit

We have upgraded our test system and changed our test suite for 2025, effectively resetting our benchmarking and rankings. However, the old data — collected using a Core i9-12900K PC — remains valid. We aren't testing new GPUs with the old testbed, as that would double the time required for what is already a lengthy process, but we felt it would be helpful to some to keep the final data available.

We also had an interim system that never quite got wrapped up, which had a Core i9-13900K Raptor Lake CPU. Our original CPU was one of the impacted units that failed over time, which explains in retrospect why so much of the data felt a bit questionable. Thankfully, the new Ryzen 7 9800X3D system seems to be running just fine. Here are the 12900K results.

For these GPU benchmarks, we tested nearly every GPU released between 2016 and 2024, plus a few extras. All graphics cards were tested at 1080p medium and 1080p ultra, and we sorted the table by the 1080p ultra results. Where it made sense, we also tested at 1440p ultra and 4K ultra. All the scores are scaled relative to the top-ranking 1080p ultra card of the time, which in our suite is the RTX 4090 — especially at 4K and 1440p.

The above summary charts show the relative performance of the cards we've tested across the past several generations of hardware at 1080p ultra — swipe through the above gallery if you want to see the 1080p medium, 1440p, and 4K ultra images. There are a few missing options (e.g., the GT 1030, RX 550, and several Titan cards), but otherwise it's basically complete. Note that we also have data in the table below for some of the other older GPUs.

The eight games used for our standard GPU benchmarks hierarchy are Borderlands 3 (DX12), Far Cry 6 (DX12), Flight Simulator (DX11 Nvidia, DX12 AMD/Intel), Forza Horizon 5 (DX12), Horizon Zero Dawn (DX12), Red Dead Redemption 2 (Vulkan), Total War Warhammer 3 (DX11), and Watch Dogs Legion (DX12). The fps score is the geometric mean (equal weighting) of the eight games. Note that the specifications column links directly to our original review for the various GPUs.

*: GPU couldn't run all tests, so the overall score is slightly skewed at 1080p ultra.

While the RTX 4090 does technically take first place at 1080p ultra, it's the 1440p and especially 4K numbers that impress. It's less than 2% faster than the RTX 4080 Super at 1080p ultra, but that increases to 9% at 1440p and then 25% at 4K. Also note that the fps numbers in our table incorporate both the average and minimum fps into a single score — with the average given more weight than the 1% low fps.

Again, keep in mind that we're not including any ray tracing or DLSS results in the above table, as we use the same test suite with the same settings on all current and previous generation graphics cards. Since only RTX cards support DLSS (and RTX 40-series if you want DLSS 3), that would drastically limit which cards we could directly compare. You can see DLSS 2/3 and FSR 2 upscaling results in our RTX 4070 review if you want to check out how the various upscaling modes can help.

The RTX 4090 comes at a steep price, though on paper it's not that much worse than the previous generation RTX 3090. In fact, we'd say it's a lot better in some respects, as the 3090 was only a minor improvement in performance compared to the 3080 at the time of launch, but with more than double the VRAM. Nvidia pulled out all the stops with the 4090, increasing the core counts, clock speeds, and power limits to push it beyond all contenders. There are two problems with the 4090, however: It's not available at MSRP any longer, due to demand from the AI sector — it often costs $2,000 or more — and there are still concerns with pulling 450W of power over the 16-pin connector.

Stepping down from the RTX 4090, the RTX 4080 Super and RX 7900 XTX trade blows at higher resolutions, while CPU bottlenecks come into play at 1080p. We'll be switching our testbed in the near future, with the current results from our 13900K testing in the charts at the bottom of the page.

Outside of the latest releases from AMD and Nvidia, the RX 6000- and RTX 30-series chips still perform reasonably well and if you're using such a card, there may not be any need to upgrade at present. Intel's Arc GPUs also fall into this category and are something of a wild card.

We've been testing and retesting GPUs periodically, and the Arc chips running the latest drivers now complete all of our benchmarks without any major anomalies. (Minecraft was previously a problem, though Intel has finally sorted that out.) They're not great on efficiency, but overall performance and pricing for the A750 is quite good.

Turning to the previous generation GPUs, the RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series chips end up scattered throughout the results, along with the RX 5000-series. The general rule of thumb is that you get one or two "model upgrades" with the newer architectures, so for example the RTX 2080 Super comes in just below the RTX 3060 Ti, while the RX 5700 XT basically matches the newer and less expensive RX 6600 XT.

Go back far enough and you can see how modern games at ultra settings severely punish cards that don't have more than 4GB VRAM. We've been saying for a few years now that 4GB was just scraping by, and these days we'd avoid buying anything with less than 8GB of VRAM — 12GB or more is the minimum we'd want with a mainstream GPU, and 16GB or more for high-end and above. Old cards like the GTX 1060 3GB and GTX 1050 actually failed to run some of our tests, which skews their results a bit, even though they do better at 1080p medium.

Now let's switch over to the ray tracing hierarchy.

Ray Tracing GPU Benchmarks 2022–2024

Enabling ray tracing, particularly with demanding games like many of those we're using in our DXR test suite, can cause framerates to drop off a cliff. We're testing with "medium" and "ultra" ray tracing settings. Medium generally means using the medium graphics preset but turning on ray tracing effects (set to "medium" if that's an option; otherwise, "on"), while ultra turns on all of the RT options at more or less maximum quality.

Because ray tracing is so much more demanding, we're sorting these results by the 1080p medium scores. That's also because the RX 6500 XT, RX 6400, and Arc A380 basically can't handle ray tracing even at these settings, and testing at anything more than 1080p medium would be fruitless.

The five ray tracing games used are Bright Memory Infinite, Control Ultimate Edition, Cyberpunk 2077, Metro Exodus Enhanced, and Minecraft — all of these use the DirectX 12 / DX12 Ultimate API. The fps score is the geometric mean (equal weighting) of the five games, and the percentage is scaled relative to the fastest GPU in the list, which again is the GeForce RTX 4090.

If you want to see what the future may hold with ray tracing, check out our Alan Wake 2 benchmarks where the full path tracing barely manages playable performance even with upscaling on non-Nvidia GPUs. However, and this is a critical point, the number of games where RT truly makes a striking difference in visuals is extremely limited. For most games, we still feel running pure rasterization rendering makes more sense.

If you felt the RTX 4090 performance was impressive at 4K in our standard test suite, just take a look at the results with ray tracing. Nvidia put even more ray tracing enhancements into the Ada Lovelace architecture, and those start to show up here. There are still further potential performance improvements for ray tracing with SER, OMM, and DMM — not to mention DLSS 3, though that ends up being a bit of a mixed bag, since the generated frames don't include new user input and add latency.

If you want a real kick in the pants, we also ran many of the faster ray tracing GPUs through Cyberpunk 2077's RT Overdrive mode, which implements full "path tracing" (full ray tracing, without any rasterization) — as well as Alan Wake 2, which uses path tracing at higher settings, and Black Myth: Wukong that supports full ray tracing. Those games provide a glimpse of how future games could behave, and why upscaling and AI techniques like frame generation are here to stay.

Even at 1080p medium, a relatively tame setting for DXR (DirectX Raytracing), the RTX 4090 roars past all contenders and leads the previous generation RTX 3090 Ti by 41%. At 1080p ultra, the lead grows to 53%, and it's nearly 64% at 1440p. Nvidia made claims before the RTX 4090 launch that it was "2x to 4x faster than the RTX 3090 Ti" — factoring in DLSS 3's Frame Generation technology — but even without DLSS 3, the 4090 is 72% faster than the 3090 Ti at 4K.

AMD continued to relegate DXR and ray tracing to secondary status, focusing more on improving rasterization performance — and on reducing manufacturing costs through the use of chiplets on the new RDNA 3 GPUs. As such, the ray tracing performance from AMD isn't particularly impressive. The top RX 7900 XTX basically matches Nvidia's previous generation RTX 3080 12GB, which puts it barely ahead of the RTX 4070 — and that's not even in all DXR games. There are some minor improvements for RT performance in RDNA 3, though, as the 7800 XT for example ends up basically tied with the RX 6800 XT in rasterization performance but is 10% faster in DXR performance.

Intel's Arc A7-series parts show a decent blend of performance in general, with the A750 coming in ahead of the RTX 3060 overall. With the latest drivers (and with vsync forced off in the options.txt file), Minecraft performance also looks much more in line with the other Arc DXR results.

You can also see what DLSS Quality mode did for performance in DXR games on the RTX 4090 in our review, but the short summary is that it boosted performance by 78% at 4K ultra. DLSS 3 frame generation improved framerates another 30% to 100% in our testing, though we recommend exercising (extreme) caution when looking at FPS with the feature enabled. It can boost framerates in benchmarks, but when actually playing games it often doesn't feel much faster than without the feature.

Overall, with DLSS 2, the 4090 in our ray tracing test suite is nearly four times as fast as AMD's RX 7900 XTX. Ouch. AMD's FSR 2 and FSR 3 can help as well, and AMD continues to work on increasing the rate of adoption, but it still trails DLSS both in the number of games supported and in the overall image quality. Only two of the games in our DXR suite have FSR2 support. By comparison, all of the DXR games we're testing support DLSS2 — and one also supports DLSS3.

Without FSR2, AMD's fastest GPUs can only clear 60 fps at 1080p ultra, while remaining decently playable at 1440p with 40–50 fps on average. But native 4K DXR remains out of reach for just about every GPU, with only the 3090 Ti and above breaking the 30 fps mark on the composite score — and a couple of games still come up short on the 3090 Ti.

AMD also has FSR 3 frame generation. Like DLSS3, it adds latency, and AMD requires the integration of Anti-Lag+ support in games that use FSR 3. But Anti-Lag+ only works with AMD GPUs, which means non-AMD cards will likely incur a larger latency penalty. We've tested it in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and found it worked pretty well, but that was not the case in Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum. It has since gained a lot more traction, though quality and latency remain quite variable — it can look and run well in one game, and then fall flat in another.

The midrange GPUs like the RTX 3070 and RX 6700 XT basically manage 1080p ultra and not much more, while the bottom tier of DXR-capable GPUs barely manage 1080p medium — and the RX 6500 XT can't even do that, with single digit framerates in most of our test suite, and one game that wouldn't even work at our chosen "medium" settings. (Control requires at least 6GB VRAM to let you enable ray tracing.)

Intel's Arc A380 ends up just ahead of the RX 6500 XT in ray tracing performance, which is interesting considering it only has 8 RTUs going up against AMD's 16 Ray Accelerators. Intel posted a deep dive into its ray tracing hardware, and Arc seems reasonably impressive, except for the fact that the number of RTUs severely limits performance. The top-end A770 still only has 32 RTUs, which proves sufficient for it to pull ahead (barely) of the RTX 3060 in DXR testing, but it can't go much further than that. Arc A750 and above also ends up ahead of AMD's RX 6750 XT in DXR performance, showing just how poor AMD's RDNA 2 hardware is when it comes to ray tracing.

It's also interesting to look at the generational performance of Nvidia's RTX cards. The slowest 20-series GPU, the RTX 2060, still outperforms the newer RTX 3050 by a bit, but the fastest RTX 2080 Ti comes in a bit behind the RTX 3070. Where the 2080 Ti basically doubled the performance of the 2060, the 3090 delivers about triple the performance of the 3050.

Test System and How We Test for GPU Benchmarks

For each graphics card, we follow the same testing procedure. We run one pass of each benchmark to "warm up" the GPU after launching the game, then run at least two passes at each setting/resolution combination. If the two runs are basically identical (within 0.5% or less difference), we use the faster of the two runs. If there's more than a small difference, we run the test at least twice more to determine what "normal" performance is supposed to be.

We also look at all the data and check for anomalies, so for example RTX 3070 Ti, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti all generally going to perform within a narrow range — 3070 Ti is about 5% faster than 3070, which is about 5% faster than 3060 Ti. If we see games where there are clear outliers (i.e. performance is more than 10% higher for the cards just mentioned), we'll go back and retest whatever cards are showing the anomaly and figure out what the "correct" result would be.

Due to the length of time required for testing each GPU, updated drivers and game patches inevitably will come out that can impact performance. We periodically retest a few sample cards to verify our results are still valid, and if not, we go through and retest the affected game(s) and GPU(s). We may also add games to our test suite over the coming year, if one comes out that is popular and conducive to testing — see our what makes a good game benchmark for our selection criteria.

GPU Benchmarks: Individual Game Charts

The above tables provide a summary of performance, but for those that want to see the individual game charts, for both the standard and ray tracing test suites, we've got those as well. We're only including more recent GPUs in these charts, as otherwise things get very messy. These are also using a newer test suite and a 13900K CPU, which changes the performance slightly from the above table, simply because our newest tests are more relevant (but haven't been run on a lot of the older GPUs shown in the tables).

These charts were up to date as of November 11, 2024.

GPU Benchmarks — 1080p Medium

GPU Benchmarks — 1080p Ultra

GPU Benchmarks — 1440p Ultra

GPU Benchmarks — 4K Ultra

GPU Benchmarks — Power, Clocks, and Temperatures

Most of our discussion has focused on performance, but for those interested in power and other aspects of the GPUs, here are the appropriate charts.

Our even older 2020–2021 'legacy' GPU benchmarks used another set of hardware with different games. Here are the details for the Coffee Lake 9900K and Z390 PC.

Tom's Hardware 2020–2021 GPU Testbed

Intel Core i9-9900K
Corsair H150i Pro RGB
MSI MEG Z390 Ace
Corsair 2x16GB DDR4-3200
XPG SX8200 Pro 2TB
Windows 10 Pro (21H1)

The results below combine results from nine games with six resolution and setting combinations. All of the scores are combined (via a geometric mean calculation) into a single overall result, which tends to penalize the fastest and slowest GPUs — CPU bottlenecks come into play at 1080p medium, while VRAM limitations can kill performance at 4K ultra.

These results have not been updated since early 2022, when we added the RTX 3050 and RX 6500 XT to the list. We won't be adding future GPUs to this table, so there's no RTX 40-series, RX 7000-series, Arc, 3090 Ti, 6950 XT, 6750 XT, or 6650 XT, but it does help to provide a look at a slightly less demanding suite of games, where 6GB or more VRAM isn't generally required at 1080p ultra settings. You can use these older results to help inform your purchase decisions, if you don't typically run the latest games at maxed out settings.

Ancient Legacy GPU Hierarchy

Below is our legacy desktop GPU hierarchy dating back to the late 1990s. We have not tested most of these cards in many years, driver support has ended on most models, and the relative rankings are pretty coarse. Note that we also don't factor in memory bandwidth or features like AMD's Infinity Cache or Nvidia's larger L2 cache on Ada Lovelace. The list below is mostly intended to show relative performance between architectures from a similar time period.

We sorted the table by the theoretical GFLOPS, though on architectures that don't support unified shaders, we only have data for "Gops/s" (giga operations per second). That's GeForce 7 and Radeon X1000 and earlier — basically anything from before 2007. We've put an asterisk (*) next to the GPU names for those cards, and they comprise the latter part of the table. Comparing pre-2007 GPUs against each other should be relatively meaningful, but trying to compare those older GPUs against newer GPUs gets a bit convoluted.

These results are, at best, merely theoretical and we don't have any recent benchmarks for most of the GPUs. As one recent example, AMD's RX 7900 GRE ranks above the RTX 4070 Ti Super, even though Nvidia's card nearly matches the RX 7900 XT in rasterization performance and easily beats even the 7900 XTX in ray tracing performance. Take the following with a healthy dose of skepticism and a liberal sprinkling of salt, in other words, but it does contain a list of just about every major desktop GPU from the past 25 years.