Somebody needs to keep mobile gaming alive through these dark times. Thankfully, the company we least expected to make a graphics-centric chip, Intel, is now touting its Intel Arc G3 as the next big thing for handhelds. The chipmaker has been hinting since CES 2026 that it’s working on an “Intel Core G3.” It turns out that it’s actually releasing two processors: the Intel Arc G3 and the Intel Arc G3 Extreme. As the name suggests, the “Extreme” version features the higher-end Arc B390 GPU, while the lower-end counterpart uses the Arc B370.
What does all this “Arc” talk actually entail? Intel hasn’t yet offered many details about its new chip, though it has more time to get into the nitty-gritty during Computex 2026. As far as GPU capabilities go, the Arc B390 integrated graphics processing unit is the same as the one found in the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H and Core Ultra X9 388H. It includes 12 Xe3 GPU cores and 12 ray tracing acceleration cores. Don’t expect to max out your Forza Horizon 6 settings on a handheld any time soon, though. The GPU supports a maximum TDP, or thermal design power, of 80W. We doubt any lower-power handheld with a limited battery will be able to max out that TDP. The Acer Predator Atlas 8 is the first handheld PC announced featuring Intel’s Arc G3 processors. © Acer The first handheld to support this processor may be Acer’s Predator Atlas 8. Without enough time with Intel-based handhelds, we have no way to know just how well they may perform compared to systems packing AMD’s current Ryzen Z2 Extreme. However, we do have a strong sense of how Intel’s iGPU runs 1080p games on devices like the Dell XPS 16 and the Asus Zenbook Duo. Which is to say, it’s surprisingly capable of hitting playable framerates, especially if you can rely on Intel’s own blend of XeSS upscaling. The last handheld PC with Intel inside was the MSI Claw 8 AI+, but it was powered by a full-scale laptop chip, the Intel Core Ultra 258V. MSI’s 8-inch handheld actually performed very well in Gizmodo’s own tests, making us imagine what would happen if Intel used its GPU architecture in a device dedicated solely to 1080p gaming.
