Intel claims that Core Ultra 9 288V beats AMD's HX370 by 16% in games, Meteor Lake is 31% ahead and the less said about Qualcomm, the better.

Intel has finally revealed details about its brand new Lunar Lake Mobile Processors. These chips are primarily designed for low-power operation and are intended for your next laptop. However, there is some good news for gamers. Intel is making a big deal about the new Xe2 iGPU that's found in these chips.

Lunar Lake, the latest product from Intel, is built using its newest GPU architecture Xe2. The top configuration of Lunar Lake's Arc 140V GPU will have eight Xe cores. This is the same as the top Meteor Lake GPU. Intel has promised to upgrade the GPU with other improvements.

Arc 130V is a smaller GPU with seven Xe cores.

It's unlikely that one Xe-core will make a big difference in performance. Damien Triolet is the director of GPU technical Marketing and says it shouldn't make a difference.

Triolet tells us, "I expect that the deltas will be more noticeable from one design to another."

We'll have to wait and see how this plays out in the testing. If you want top gaming performance in a laptop without a discrete graphics card, you should look at the 140V.

Lunar Lake also shares memory on-package between the CPU and GPU. There are two memory options, 16 GB and 32 GB LPDDR5X-8533, with the larger option offering the best performance.

Here are the Core Ultra 200V series specifications in full.

Robert Hallock, Intel's Robert Hallock, said at the Lunar Lake launch in Berlin: "I am not going to call this a gaming processor, but, damn it, it can play games."

Then, you're talking a big game.

Intel has provided us with some benchmarks to consider ahead of the Core Ultra 200V release later this month. All are performed at 1080p. These are some figures to consider before we do our own benchmarking. Intel did promote the benefits of unbiased benchmarking, but I don't think I need to explain why independent results still matter.

Intel claims that the Core Ultra 7 155H (140V GPU), its previous generation Core Ultra 9 288V, offers a 31% improvement in gaming performance.

This is a nice upgrade over the 1080p experience that was available on Meteor Lake, driver pending.

This is an eight-core Xe2 GPU versus an eight-core Xe GPU. The 155H isn't the top chip from Meteor Lake. Core Ultra 9's 185H is a better choice for comparison, as it offers a slightly faster GPU clock than the 155H at 2.35 GHz versus 2.25 GHz. However, it has a higher TDP. This means that it's not apples to apples, but close.

Intel claims a 16 percent improvement in a variety of games over AMD's Ryzen AI 9HX 370 chip, which I tested recently inside the Asus Zephyrus G162024.

The AMD test system and the Lunar Lake system are very similar. Both systems run 32 GB RAM. The Intel system uses faster LPDDR5X at 8,533MT/s compared to AMD's 7,500MT/s. The Intel system also uses a newer Windows release: 26100.1301, as opposed to 26100.1150 for AMD. I'd guess that the newer Windows versions include updates to use Intel's new thread director in Lunar Lake.

Intel spent much less time comparing AMD to Qualcomm at the Lunar Lake Event than it did Qualcomm. Intel is clearly annoyed by Qualcomm's latest laptop processors. This is why Intel was quick to point out that the Qualcomm X1E84-100 chip failed to run 23 of its test games.

Intel claims that in the games which did run, it had a 68% higher frame rate than the Qualcomm chip.

Lunar Lake is a very good chip for 1080p gaming, even though it's unlikely to be widely used as a gaming processor. At some point we will see a 200V Series powered handheld, the MSI Claw 8 for January. OEMs may also use Lunar Lake with discrete graphics.

Although Intel may not have wanted to include games that didn't play well on Intel systems, the list has generally shrunk since Alchemist discrete card was first released. However, they are still not immune to all issues.

Intel has said that it is focusing on streamlining its Xe2 gaming architecture to reduce incompatibilities, and increase utilisation - two things its first gaming platform suffered from. I hope that Intel has managed to achieve this for future Lunar Lake portable gaming PCs.

Triolet tells me that the software stack and drivers, which bring it all together, will be at least improved by the time Lunar Lake or Xe2 is available in discrete form.

"We use the exact same software stack across all of our GPU families, and today's software stack is the most stable ever." It makes sense, doesn't it? "We've been working hard on this for the last few years."

The Xe2 architecture shown here is the same as that which will be used in Intel's upcoming Battlemage discrete graphics cards. Unfortunately, Intel has not yet spoken about these. Let's hope we don't have to wait much longer.