Kaby Lake Integrated Graphics Powerful Enough for Your Favorite PC Games, Intel Claims

Intel has revealed its new seventh generation CPUs. Named Kaby Lake, the processors will debut in laptops and Ultrabooks beginning early September. Desktop and gaming notebook variants are scheduled to release early next year.

With Kaby Lake’s integrated graphics solution, Intel says, “Users can play their favorite PC games on the go in HD with fluid, texture-rich graphics.” While Kaby Lake will be built on Intel’s 14nm production process, which is the same process used by the company’s Skylake micro-architecture, Intel says that it has made enough under-the-hood improvements, which allow the architecture to reach double-digit performance at the silicon level, that it’s now rebranding the process as “14nm plus.”

At the company’s Intel Developer Forum event in San Francisco earlier this month, the company showed us a thin Dell notebook equipped with a dual-core Kaby Lake CPU featuring Intel’s HD Graphics 620. The laptop was playing Overwatch at 30 average frames per second at 720p medium settings. This is pretty impressive, considering the notebook was using a relatively low-powered U-series 15-watt CPU and wasn’t running on the company’s higher-end Iris and Iris Pro integrated graphics solution, which will be coming in January. Kaby Lake notebooks may scratch the itch of PC gamers who aren’t interested in purchasing high-end gaming notebooks, but want to play less graphically demanding PC games on the go.

Intel asserts that battery life will also see an improvement with the new micro-architecture, claiming that it will offer up to 75 percent better battery life in video playback compared to Skylake.

Kaby Lake CPUs will also support Thunderbolt 3 through the USB Type-C standard, which could allow thin and light notebooks to use desktop graphics cards by way of an external GPU dock.

Notebooks with Intel’s seventh generation CPUs will begin shipping next month.