Intel ‘Lunar Lake’ handhelds, laptops are getting a free gaming boost

Who doesn’t like a free performance upgrade? And if you own a laptop or a handheld PC with an Intel Core Ultra 200V (Lunar Lake) chip inside, you’re getting one.

Intel said Tuesday that the company’s latest graphics driver (32.0.101.6734) is offering a power-management update that has the effect of boosting GPU performance by about 10 percent in terms of higher frame rate. You’ll see it first in handhelds, specifically the MSI Claw 8 AI+ and MSI Claw 7 AI+, but it will be rolled out to other Lunar Lake / Core Ultra 200V systems soon, Intel said.

Essentially, the driver allows higher performance at the default power level of 17W, Intel said. There are two improvements: the higher frame rate, and a 25 percent improvement on what’s known as the “99th percentile” frame rate. The latter term is also sometimes referred to as “the lows” or “1 percent lows,” and refers to rare moments when the frame rate drops suddenly. These rare moments still manifest themselves as a jitter or hitch, and can disrupt timing-driven games — and they just look bad. Essentially, this new graphics update will make games run faster, as well as smoother.

And what games? Intel provided a sample, below:

Intel

Intel has invested heavily in software driver development to avoid the issues that plagued the first-gen Intel “Alchemist” GPUs,” Intel fellow Tom Petersen told PCWorld’s The Full Nerd podcast in December. And Intel’s second-gen Arc B580 “Battlemage” GPU was essentially a tariff-buster, before there were tariffs.

Since the Lunar Lake chips include the Xe2 GPU that later ended up in Battlemage, it seems reasonable that Intel’s driver update could enable these gains. Will we see something similar inside the B580 cards, too?