Hands on: Intel's Core Ultra 7 165H is golden for gaming, if you can turn on XeSS, and mostly playable without
Over at CES 2024 I was handed a couple hours to do with as I pleased with an MSI Prestige 16 laptop. On the surface, that might not sound too exciting for a PC gamer, as the Prestige line isn't explicitly built for gaming, but this laptop had inside it Intel's latest Core Ultra 165H processor. That's a 55W version of Meteor Lake with six P-cores, eight E-cores, two Low Power E-cores, and eight Xe-cores—a whole lot for a small mobile chip.
Give me some time with a new chip and I'm going to reach for some games to play on it. Let's start with the best gaming performance I experienced. While I was installing another game on my machine, a fellow journalist let me dive in on Shadow of the Tomb Raider on theirs. Initial impressions were very good for a mobile iGPU.
On SotTR's lowest graphics setting, and with XeSS on balanced, we were seeing performance of 71fps on average and 60fps minimum at 1080p. I know that sounds like Child's play to a discrete GPU, but I'm writing this from a NUC 15 laptop I've been using for a couple of years now, fitted with a Tiger Lake generation mobile processor, and it's not a pleasant experience for gaming. By comparison, in SotTR, the Core Ultra 7 165H put on a pretty good show.
You can tweak the settings a bit more to favour graphics quality. Turn XeSS up to Performance mode and set the game to Medium and you're looking at 56fps on average and 43fps minimum.
We ran a couple other benchmarks covering various combinations. Here are the results:
On the flipside, you will have to lower your expectations if you venture on without XeSS. In SotTR we only just scraped 30fps at a minimum with it disabled. I also ran Horizon Zero Dawn on my machine on the medium preset at 1080p and found I was reaching
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