What Games Can Ultrabooks Really Play?

Thin and light ultraportable laptops are not gaming systems. Focusing more on productivity and battery life for working on the go, these sort of laptops aren't equipped with enough integrated graphics horsepower to take on today's popular triple-A titles. Nimble machines like ultrabooks leave gaming to their larger gaming laptop brothers, which trade off portability for pure discrete GPU power.

But just like gaming laptops have become thinner and more portable over the years, integrated GPUs in most ultraportables are not as useless as they once were. It is actually possible to game on an ultrabook, it's just a matter of choosing the game and its settings carefully such that it's not too intensive for the 15W Intel CPU in most low-power laptops.

With this in mind, we've tested 34 games on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon: from current AAA titles to older 2D platformers, to give you an idea of what games are actually playable on modern ultraportables.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon we used is the entry-level model with an Intel Kaby Lake Core i5-7200U, 8GB of RAM and a 1080p display. The i5-7200U is essentially the base U-series CPU you'll find in ultraportables, with two cores, four threads, a base clock of 2.5 GHz, and a boost clock of 3.1 GHz. The integrated GPU is an HD 620 with 24 execution units clocked up to 1000 MHz.

All the testing in this article is reflective of the entry-level ultraportable experience, but of course you can find laptops with more powerful CPUs like the i7-7500U, which delivers about five percent (!) more graphics performance. Occasionally you might also see ultraportables with Iris Plus graphics, which use CPUs like the i7-7567U with double the GPU execution units, but these laptops are rare, so our testing is largely representative of most standard ultrabooks.

Current AAA Games

The first group of games I tested were triple-A titles, ranging from new games like Prey to titles like The Witcher 3 from a few years back. All of these games were designed to be played on at least Xbox One console hardware, and all require some form of discrete GPU to meet their 'minimum' requirements.