Intel Core Ultra 7 258V iGPU takes the fight to Nvidia’s GTX 1650

iGPUs are slowly climbing the performance ladder.

Intel Lunar Lake processor.

The upcoming Intel Core Ultra 7 258V processor has been through the Geekbench test, revealing the performance of the Arc 140V iGPU inside. The results put it on par with Nvidia’s GTX 1650 mobile GPU.

According to Geekbench 6’s Vulkan benchmark results, the Arc 140V Battlemage iGPU found inside the Core Ultra 7 258V CPU delivered 34,181 points. This puts it head to head with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650 mobile chip, beating the AMD Radeon 780M that powers Ryzen 7940HS by about 8%.

Assuming Arc 140V scales linearly when it comes to gaming, we can expect around 45fps in God of War at 1080p Original, 70fps in Forza Horizon 5 at 1080p High, and 70fps in GTA V at 1080 Very High. Not bad for an iGPU that sips power. The Battlemage GPUs should also deliver a 50% uplift in ray tracing performance, though we can’t speculate on that until we see real-world tests.

Intel Core Ultra 7 258V iGPU Geekbench score.

The tester apparently conducted the benchmark on an Intel evaluation platform for mobile Lunar Lake chips, suggesting that it’s an engineering sample running with the balanced power mode. If correct, then there is still room for improvement for those who don’t mind the extra noise and heat. The chip is also bundled with 32GB of on-package LPDDR5x memory, which is the highest capacity available in this series.

As a reminder, the Core Ultra 7 258V CPU carries four P-cores and four LP-E-cores boosting up to 4.8GHz, alongside a 47 TOPS NPU and the aforementioned Arc 140V iGPU. AMD configures the chip with 17W PL1 (continuous) and 30W PL2 (short boost) TDP, making it efficient enough for gaming handhelds.

This Lunar Lake processor will go head to head against AMD’s upcoming Ryzen AI 300 Strix Point APUs, which feature faster RDNA 3.5 iGPUs. Next-gen thin and light laptops should get some nice performance uplifts, and we can’t wait to get our hands on them.