Panther Lake's gaming chops look solid but the battery life is truly what interests me as a PC gamer on the go

We've had the chance to do some quick game testing of Panther Lake, Intel's latest generation of mobile chips, and we are impressed. That's good news for a company that has looked like it's been a bad place for far too long. I'm happy to hear that future Intel laptops could have good gaming chops without a dedicated GPU, but it's not just the gaming performance that has wowed me thus far. It's something much more mundane: multi-day laptop battery life.

AMD's SVP and GM of Client Product Group, Rahul Tikoo, recently took a swing at Panther Lake, and part of the argumentation is that consumers buy chips based on needs, rather than going for a little bit of everything. In this, Tikoo argues that AMD offers the top of the line for gaming, and therefore, gamers will pick AMD. However, as someone who games a lot, I don't actually look for the absolute best gaming performance out of my laptop. I look for 'good enough' gaming, plus solid ergonomics, a decent weight, and most importantly, strong battery life.

Panther Lake, with its sprinkling of P, E, LPE, and Xe3 cores, is being promised to offer an estimated up to 27 hours of Netflix streaming, which is up to 60% more than Lunar Lake.

MSI's Prestige Panther Lake laptops put those figures at "up to 30+ hours of 1080p video playback". Naturally, gaming will hog that battery much more than streaming shows, but those are still impressive stats nonetheless. As well as this, battery performance will depend on battery size and things like screen size and panel type. For this reason, comparisons aren't an exact parallel. Still, the ROG Flow Z13 with its AI Max 390 chip estimates 10+ hours of battery life out of its 70 WH battery and our Flow Z13 testing measured around an hour and a half of gaming.

Asus' Zenbook S14 UX5406 with its Lunar Lake Intel Core Ultra 9 288V estimates 27 hours of battery life from its 72 Wh, with a very similar methodology to MSI. The PCMark battery life test puts that at 155 minutes while gaming. Two and a half hours of battery life is very solid for a laptop, and if Panther Lake is handily beating those figures, I'd be very happy.

This is because, as much as I love to crank a game up to its highest resolution and best fps, I've never expected that from a device on the go. If it can fit into my bag, and I can use it for a day of work and a spot of gaming from a cafe, I'd be much happier.

I have a chunky Lenovo Legion I bought five years ago with an RTX 30-something in it, and it's still not awful at playing many games. However, when I went to my home country of Ireland over Christmas, it was my M4 MacBook Air that came with me. Even with the growing pains that are Apple's compatibility, I found the joy of such a light, sturdy device to be too alluring. And, in a sense, that's not too far off the experience I want out of a gaming laptop.

Of course, there's always a middle ground between gaming performance and battery efficiency, but early gaming figures are hitting all the right notes. With Intel reckoning its Arc B390 iGPU is around 10% faster on average compared with an RTX 4050, our figures saw CyberPunk 2077 on High settings at 1200p, without upscaling and ray tracing, to come in at an average fps of 53.

With upscaling on Quality via XeSS, that figure jumped up to 74 fps average. With ray tracing at Ultra and frame generation on, we only saw a small decrease to 70 fps. I'd argue this is pretty great for a device without a dedicated GPU, when we consider the heat, portability, and cash upsides that come with it.

This is before mentioning what that could mean for gaming handhelds. Gaming handhelds don't get dedicated GPUs. There are too many concerns for battery size, thermals, and general ergonomics to bother with such extravagance.

When mobile chips are offering genuinely solid gaming performance without one, there's really no need. Intel is also rumored to be working on a dedicated handheld gaming chip called the Core G3 Extreme, with a full-spec 12-core Xe3 iGPU. This is a section where Intel could take the crown this year. We don't have the price point, and this will ultimately be one of the biggest deciders, but things are looking surprisingly good for 18A right now.

Until we have it in our hands, battery life figures are a tad nebulous, though. We need real-life tests to actually know how effective the efficiencies offered in Panther Lake are. However, this is the most excited I've been for an Intel launch in some time, and I'm hoping it's as impressive in the hands.