Today we are taking a closer look at the Arc 140V iGPU that’s found within Intel's new Core Ultra 200V (Lunar Lake) CPUs. Leo's already reviewed the ASUS Zenbook S 14 laptop with a Core Ultra 7 258V, so this isn’t our first hands on with the new architecture, but today we're only interested in the gaming performance on offer from the iGPU.

Timestamps

00:00 Intro
00:42 Background and test setup
02:40 COD: MW3
03:34 Cyberpunk 2077
04:27 F1 23
05:16 Forza Horizon 5
06:14 Horizon Forbidden West
06:38 Returnal
07:15 Shadow of the Tomb Raider
08:31 Spider-Man Miles Morales
09:34 Starfield
10:27 Closing thoughts

Specification

• CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 258V (4P + 4E)
• NPU: up to 48 TOPS
• Screen: 14.0-inch, 2,880×1,800 3K, 120Hz refresh OLED touch screen, 500 nits
• Graphics: Intel Arc 140V 16GB
• Memory: 32GB of on-board Micron LPDDR5X-8533MT/sec
• SSD: 500GB Samsung PM9C1 Gen 4 M.2 NVMe SSD
• Wi-Fi:  Asus Wi-Fi 7 Tri-band and Bluetooth 5.4
• FHD IR Camera
• I/O ports
  • Left hand side:
    • 2x Thunderbolt 4 Type-C 40Gbps
    • 1x HDMI 2.1
    • 3.5mm Audio combo jack
  • Right hand side:
  • 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A
• Battery 72Wh/4-cell, 65W adapter
• Operating System: Windows 11 Home with Copilot+
• Dimensions 310mm x 215mm x 11.9mm-12.9mm
• Weight 1.2kg plus 250g for power supply and mains cable

Testing

Today's testing is a bit different to our usual style as we're not presenting a whole heap of benchmark charts. Instead, I captured a range of different games, running at a variety of image quality settings, some with and some without upscaling – to give you a ‘real world' look at the gaming performance on offer from this iGPU. That is quite hard to present in written form, so I do recommend watching the video above to see how this iGPU fares. We're also presenting the benchmarks in a ‘head to head' style, with the Arc 140V going up against the Radeon 890M that we looked at back in August.

While I highly recommend watching the video – and we have timestamped each of the games tested so you can quickly skip ahead if you are more interested in specific titles – it was fascinating to see just how variable the performance from the 140V could be. It looked a world-beater in certain titles like Cyberpunk 2077, coming in around 15% faster than the Radeon 890M while drawing less power.

However, for every game like that, we also saw our fair share of dodgy results, including frame rates tanking in Forza Horizon 5 when enabling FSR, game-breaking graphical corruption in Horizon Forbidden West, and just downright terrible frame rates in Spider-Man Miles Morales when compared to the Radeon 890M.

There’s certainly a lot of potential here, particularly in regards to the overall efficiency on show, but I do think it’s the drivers letting performance down. In my view, the Arc 140V is just too inconsistent overall, and if I were picking which iGPU I wanted in my next gaming handheld, based on the current experience I'd have to opt for the Radeon 890M instead.

Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.

KitGuru says: There's a lot of potential with the Arc 140V but it does need a bit more polish on the driver side.

Become a Patron!