Intel’s Panther Lake has clearly and undoubtedly ramped up the expectations of the chipmaker’s iGPU segment, so much so that some folks in the gaming handheld segment are genuinely excited for its Arc G3 Series of iGPUs. On that note, a new rumour hints at a possible appearance of gaming handhelds powered by said iGPUs at Computex 2026.
According to Videocardz, Intel may be planning on revealing its Arc G3 and G3 Extreme via two OEM partner gaming handheld devices, MSI and OneXPlayer. The former isn’t all that surprising, given its history with the chipmaker: the MSI Claw was one of the first, if not only, gaming handheld to ship out with an Intel Meteor Lake CPU at the time, while other handheld manufacturers were embracing AMD’s Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU.
On a sidebar, the report seems consistent with earlier reports that the chipmaker had planned to delay the launch of the G3 Series to the second quarter of this year. And Computex 2026 falls nicely in place of that timeline. While detailed specifications of the iGPUs are still largely unknown, we do know that the G3 should have a 25W configurable TDP, along with turbo settings of 65W and 80W, respectively.
Getting back in it, it’s no secret that the Ryzen Z1 Extreme was the better processor at the time. Meteor Lake’s iGPU performance was abysmal by comparison, and it nearly cost MSI a seat at the gaming handheld table. Believe us, we gave the original Claw two swings, and it missed on both occasions. To both the blue chipmaker and OEM partner’s credit, the succeeding Claw 8 AI Plus was a significant improvement, although not by much. Then, just last year, MSI released a Claw 8 powered by AMD’s Ryzen Z2 Extreme APU.
That said, Intel didn’t just throw in the towel and had its graphics department burn the midnight oil. The end result of those laborious hours is Panther Lake, or Core Ultra Series 3 lineup, and the Arc B390 and B370 iGPUs in them. We’ve already tested the B390 with the attached Core Ultra X9 388H, both in the form of the dual-screen wonder, the ASUS Zenbook DUO. It is not an exaggeration when we say that the iGPU is nothing short of breathtakingly impressive, with the processor capable of running graphically demanding titles such as Cyberpunk 2077 at moderately high settings without skipping a beat.
In any case, it’s still early days, and Intel has yet to make any official announcement regarding its G3 Extreme and non-Extreme iGPUs for gaming handhelds. So, we’ll just have to wait with bated breath until June this year. And who knows, maybe we’ll finally see an updated gaming handheld from Acer, seeing how its Blaze series of gaming handhelds never really made it to our market.
(Source: Videocardz)
