During the official presentation of Intel Lunar Lake, I had the opportunity to participate in a special session dedicated exclusively to this Intel Xe2, the new integrated GPU which the chip giant uses in this new generation of low-power processors, and the truth is that everything I saw was very promising.

The Intel Xe2 uses the Battlemage architecture, which as most of our readers know is the successor of the Alchemist. The improvements that Intel has introduced in this architecture are so significant that I am preparing a special to talk about each of them in depth, based on the official information that Intel shared with us during the event that it recently held in Taiwan.

All in all, and in summary, I can tell you that the chip giant has not only achieved a large improvement in rasterization performance, but also has increased ray tracing performance and better compatibilityperformance in games based on old APIs, connectivity and scalability of this architecture.

We are doing a direct comparison with the Intel Meteor Lake Xe Alchemist GPU we have 50% performance improvement, higher efficiency and wider support for next-generation technologies, codecs and connectivity. If we talk about gaming performance, the difference is so big that the Intel Xe2 is able to run games at 1080p resolution with ray tracing while maintaining a stable frequency of 60 FPS.

During a special session dedicated to this GPU, I had the opportunity to see F1 2024 running on an Intel Xe2 GPU of an Intel Lunar Lake processor with a configuration that would have seemed impossible to us in an integrated solution until recently. This game has moved 1080p with high quality and ray tracing applied to shadows at 60 FPS.

Impressive for sure, although it should be taken into account that to achieve this level of performance, Intel XeSS technology was activated in performance mode. Intel didn’t show any performance metrics during the demo run with the F1 24, but I can confirm that at first glance the level of detail was very good and the smoothness of the demo it can run at a steady 60 FPS.

The Intel Xe2 GPU integrated into Intel Lunar Lake has matrix units, which means Intel XeSS ran with hardware acceleration. This is important because such acceleration enables better scaling of both performance and image quality, placing this technology well above AMD FSR.

It is important that you keep in mind that ray tracing significantly degrades performance and that the Intel Xe2 GPU used is ultra-low energy solution, meaning its TDP was less than 20 watts. This “appetizer” that Intel gave us left me anticipating and wanting to see what Battlemage will be capable of when it hits the dedicated graphics market. It is expected to launch at the end of the year or early 2025.