Intel Lunar Lake 15W Benchmarks Bode Well For Future Gaming Handhelds

In our reviews of Lunar Lake systems, we've noted that a particular bright spot for the new Intel SoC, besides its excellent efficiency, is its graphics performance. However, the previous-generation Meteor Lake machines could also offer great graphics performance—when using unlimited power budgets, at least. How does Lunar Lake fare against the competition from both inside and out when sharply power-limited, as it would be in a handheld? Let's try to figure that out...

It turns out, pretty damn well. Chinese-language tech 'tuber Geekerwan compared Lunar Lake against competing parts from AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, and Intel's own previous generation in a variety of games at both 30W and 15W power limits. The 30W results are impressive in their own right, with Lunar Lake easily holding its own or dominating in every single benchmark against AMD's Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU.

What's really impressive about Geekerwan's testing are the results at 15W, though. It can be said that most of the benchmarks aren't producing playable performance across the majority of the chips in question, but Intel's Core Utlra 258V "Lunar Lake" chip is consistently ahead of the competition at 15W. Notably, it becomes the first SoC to really consistently outpace the "Aerith" or "Van Gogh" SoC in the Steam Deck at 15W.

While the Ryzen Z1 Extreme used in the ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go is considerably more powerful than "Aerith" at higher power limits, it actually tends to struggle at lower limits like 15W. It was really designed for laptops rather than handhelds, and it struggles to keep up clocks on its eight CPU cores and twelve GPU cores with only 15W to spare around the components.

Lunar Lake, meanwhile, sprints out ahead, with excellent performance out of its Xe2-based graphics component. As we noted in the headline, this bodes very well for gaming handhelds based on Intel's new baby SoC, which pretty much live and die at the 15W power limit. While devices like the ROG Ally X can pack in huge batteries to allow hours of gameplay at higher power limits, this does make them more expensive and unwieldy.

Intel still has a few teething issues with its driver—we recently found that the game Selaco will cause Lunar Lake machines to bluescreen and reboot on launch, for example—but they're becoming rarer by the update. By and large, anything you want to play is going to work well, even games on older APIs like DirectX 9 or OpenGL. Really, more than new gaming handhelds, these results make us particularly excited for Intel's upcoming second-generation discrete graphics parts. Let's hope we hear something about those before too much longer, since they're supposed to launch this year.

Head over to Bilibili if you want to watch Geekerwan's video for yourself; there are auto-translation captions you can enable that work pretty well. It's a full Lunar Lake review, including productivity benchmarks and battery life. He comes to pretty much the same conclusion we did, though.