New Intel graphics driver claims a remarkable 35% performance boost for Panther Lake's nifty little iGPU in Witcher 3 at 1080p

Intel is making some eye-popping claims for its latest graphics driver release for Arc graphics. According to the official release notes, the Intel Core Ultra series 3—otherwise known as Panther Lake—benefits from a fully 35% uplift in Witcher 3 performance.

Specifically, that's 35% when running at 1080p High, which should be a pretty relevant setting for what is a high-performing iGPU. Witcher 3 wasn't part of our benchmark suite when Andy ran Panther Lake through its paces. However, given the broad performance profile of Witcher 3 and the capability of Panther Lake's iGPU, 1080p High is very much a plausible target.

Our performance review found that the Arc B390 iGPU in Panther Lake delivers roughly 75% the frame rate of an RTX 4050 laptop GPU. And that Nvidia chip generally hits 60 fps-plus in the Witcher 3 at 1080p High.

So, you'd expect a reasonably playable 40-something fps from Panther Lake. Add another 35%, and you'd have a pretty decent experience, though the boost may be fixing what was a slightly anomalous performance in that title for Panther Lake.

The new driver also promises more performance for Intel's now elderly A-Series GPUs, such as the Intel Arc A770, though in this case, it's Resident Evil Requiem that receives more frames. In this context, Intel is actually claiming up to 40% average fps uplift at 1080p with Ultra settings and up to 30% boost at 1440p Ultra.

Anywho, exactly where Intel is extracting the performance from the Arc B390 iGPU in particular is an open question. However, Nick's recent analysis presents one interesting possibility.

He concluded that one limiting factor for the iGPU involves "how well Intel's drivers and firmware currently handle data flows between the shared system memory and the iGPU.

"There's a decent amount of bandwidth on tap from using fast LPDDR5x, but those DRAM latencies aren't exactly great, and I suspect that stops the Arc B390 from being able to reach its full potential in some games."

So, maybe Intel has made some progress with tuning that shared memory interface. Whatever, the Arc B390 was already the best iGPU out there. Now it's just got that little bit better. If you are running an Arc GPU, you can snag the new driver here.