It’s official: AMD beats Intel in gaming laptops

We are constantly making comparisons between AMD and Intel when reviewing some of the best gaming laptops on the market. Just like desktops, we’re trying to find which company makes the best processor you can buy. It’s never a perfect comparison, though. Differences between the thermal design and build quality of laptops make it next to impossible to truly get a one-to-one comparison. Now, we finally have the chance for that comparison.

Asus sent out its new ROG Zephyrus G16 equipped with one of AMD’s new Zen 5 CPUs, giving us a chance to compare it to the Intel-based ROG Zephyrus G16 we reviewed earlier this year. I didn’t expect a big difference in performance given that these two laptops are basically identical. Boy, was I wrong.

A rare opportunity

This kind of opportunity doesn’t come up often. We compare AMD and Intel CPUs directly all the time, even in laptops, but you don’t get the chance to see two nearly identical laptops go head-to-head very often. The design of a laptop plays a major role in performance, which is why we almost never make blanket claims about how AMD and Intel stack up against each other when comparing two laptops in isolation. We have to bring in a bunch of laptops to see if there’s a trend.

With the Zephyrus G16, I’ve had the chance to compare AMD and Intel directly. Everything about these two laptops is identical. They use the same charger, same body, same cooling solution, and the same graphics card. There are two major differences — the CPU and the memory. First, the memory. The AMD Zephyrus G16 has 32GB of memory while the Intel version only has 16GB. The memory is soldered, so as much as I would like to take out a DIMM and get a true apples-to-apples comparison, that’s not possible.

The more significant difference is, of course, the CPU. The AMD version is leveraging a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, which is a 12-core CPU with a maximum boost clock of 5.1GHz. It operates at 28W. The Intel version uses a Core Ultra 9 185H, which has 16 cores and a boost clock of 5.1GHz. It operates at 45W.

Although it sounds like Intel is ahead on specs, that’s actually not the case. The Core Ultra 185H uses a hybrid architecture, and some of the cores don’t support Hyperthreading. Because of that, the Core Ultra 185H supports 22 threads while the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 supports 24. Regardless of the specs, the important thing to know is that these are AMD’s and Intel’s flagship mobile processors right now, at least until we see Intel’s Lunar Lake CPUs later this year.

When you need to be productive

Let’s not waste any more time. You can see my benchmarks below, which focus on real applications as much as possible. For the creation apps, I used PugetBench for Creators, so the number you see is the score I got in those benchmarks. Higher is better, of course.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff here. First, Cinebench. Although Cinebench isn’t a “real” application, it helps set the stage for the difference between these two CPUs. AMD is ahead in both single- and multi-core performance. Given the difference in memory capacity, I ran Cinebench to ensure that there really was a difference in the CPUs alone and that performance changes weren’t solely a result of the memory difference.

Photoshop helped on that quest, too. You can see it’s a major outlier compared to the other tests I ran, and that’s no surprise. Photoshop uses a percentage of the memory available to it, allowing the AMD laptop with its 32GB of memory to achieve a much higher score. You shouldn’t attribute the performance jump solely to the CPU. Instead, consider Cinebench and Photoshop opposite ends of comparing these two laptops. In Cinebench, the CPU is making the biggest difference, while in Photoshop, the CPU is playing much less of a role.

DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro provide the clearest look into how these two CPUs differ. AMD was 10% ahead in Resolve and 7% ahead in Premiere Pro, which is a fairly consistent range across the tests I ran. It’s one thing to find two similar laptops with differing CPUs and compare them. With these results, though, it’s safe to say that the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is about 7% to 10% faster than the Core Ultra 9 185H, at least in productivity apps.

A little gaming action

Games are a very interesting area to look at with these two laptops, and that’s for a couple of reasons. First, they’re using the same GPU, but more importantly, both GPUs are tuned identically. Laptop brands not only set different Total Graphics Power (TGP) amounts but they also have different software parameters. Both of these laptops use the RTX 4070 with a 105W TGP, and they both have their power managed through Asus Armoury Crate.

I thought that would mean the two laptops would perform very similarly, but that really wasn’t the case. Before getting into the games, it’s worth setting the stage with 3DMark. As you can see below, the two machines were basically identical in Fire Strike and Time Spy, with the AMD configuration slightly trailing. Surprisingly, the AMD configuration was much slower in Port Royal, which is a ray tracing benchmark. Ray tracing can stress the CPU quite a bit, and perhaps the extra power available to the Core Ultra 185H is helping out in that test.

3DMark doesn’t tell the full story, and my results from real games below proves that fact. Across the board, the AMD version of the Zephyrus G16 is faster than the Intel version, and sometimes by a significant margin. In Horizon Zero Dawn, AMD is providing a huge uplift, and in Red Dead Redemption 2, AMD is nearly hitting 60 frames per second (fps) while Intel isn’t even close.

Games rarely benefit from 32GB of memory versus 16GB, and the games I tested here really don’t call for more than 16GB of memory. What’s surprising is that all of these tests were ran at the native resolution of the screen (1600p) and at the highest graphics preset. At higher resolutions and graphics settings, the CPU usually plays less of a role in performance. The results here are a good showcase of the delicate ecosystem that’s going on inside a laptop.

AMD wins this round

Intel is gearing up to launch its Lunar Lake CPUs, so it’s no surprise that AMD comes out on top in this comparison. I just didn’t expect AMD to dominate as much as it did. Despite using a smaller power envelope and being at a core disadvantage, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is faster than the Core Ultra 9 185H across both games and productivity apps. That’s before we even get to aspects of a laptop like battery life — read our ZenBook S 16 review to see how long AMD’s new laptop CPUs last.

That doesn’t mean you should just blindly pick up an AMD laptop. Even two laptops with identical specs can have far different performance, so it’s always important to consult individual laptop reviews before making a buying decision. Between AMD and Intel in the same design, however, I’d recommend going with AMD, at least until we see what Lunar Lake has to offer.