Intel’s Arc graphics solutions initially got off to a rocky start on the Linux side, but the tide appears to be turning. Phoronics was recently tested New Panther Lake Intel Arc B390 iGPU Intel Core Ultra X7 358Hcomparing new iGPUs to venerable iGPUs Radeon 890M On the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, Intel’s iGPU surprisingly consistently outperforms the Radeon iGPU. If you’ve been following early Windows benchmarks, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. In this publication, we tested the new Xe3 integrated graphics on an MSI Prestige 14 running the latest Mesa 26.0 driver on Linux kernel version 6.19 on Ubuntu 26.04.

When it comes to gaming, the only games where the Xe3 iGPU beat AMD’s competition were Counterstrike 2 and Quake II RTX running at 1920×1200. In all other games, the Intel Arc B390 significantly outperformed both the AMD competition and the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and Core Ultra 7 258V. Depending on the game and in-game settings, the Arc B390 ranged from 15% to over 50%. Hitman 3 was a particularly impressive outlier, with the B390 achieving over 50% more FPS than its closest competitor at 1920×1200 and low settings, and 64% more FPS than the Radeon 890M. We saw similar gains at medium quality settings, but the performance gains were slightly less impressive when bumped up to ultra settings.

There was a similar development when it came to gaming benchmarks, with the Arc B390 coming out on top in 3DMark Wild Life Extreme (scoring 20% ​​higher than the Radeon 890M), narrowly winning 3DMark Solar Bay, and GravityMark with the Arc B390 again dominating the OpenGL, Vulkan, and Vulkan Ray Tracing benchmarks. The Arc iGPU also performed admirably on Unigine Superposition, Valley, and Heaven, with less than a 30% lead over the competition. Curiously, the AMD Radeon 890M was on par with the Arc B390 in terms of efficiency, even if the raw performance wasn’t up to par with Team Red.