Intel says Xe2 'Battlemage' GPU inside of Lunar Lake CPUs is the 'world's best built-in GPU'

Intel's new Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake" processors ship with next-gen Xe2 "Battlemage" integrated GPUs that offer some gigantic improvements in performance, right after AMD launches its Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" APUs with upgraded RDNA 3.5-based Radeon 890M GPUs.

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The new Xe2 "Battlemage" GPU has a 50% performance increase over Xe "Alchemist" inside of Meteor Lake, with more improvements in ray tracing through improved ray tracing units, better utilization of the CPU cores versus Alchemist Xe-LPG GPUs.;

Intel compares its Xe GPUs on the Core Ultra 7 155H "Meteor Lake" CPU against the new flagship Core Ultra 9 288V "Lunar Lake" CPU in a bunch of games, delivering a 31% uplift in performance, and in some games, over 60-70% more performance over Alchemist. Very nice to see.

The company compares its new Xe2 "Battlemage" GPU inside of Lunar Lake against Qualcomm's integrated Adreno GPU inside of its new Snapdragon X processors, with the Adreno GPU failing to run 23 of the games in Intel's test suite.

• Read more: Intel launches Core Ultra 200V series 'Lunar Lake' to battle AMD, Qualcomm

This is because Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor is an Arm-based chip, not capable of running games made for x86 (regular processors from Intel and AMD).

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The bigger comparison is between Battlemage and RDNA 3.5, with Intel claiming to have its Xe2 GPU being 16% faster than the Radeon 890M inside of Strix Point. This is the new Arc A140V GPU, compared against the Radeon 890M, and the new Xe2 "Battlemage" GPU is keeping up, or besting the RDNA 3.5 GPU in some games. Another impressive feat for Lunar Lake.

It's not just raw GPU hardware anymore, but the software and graphics division have forged ahead with Battlemage and Xe2 launches with over 120 games that support XeSS upscaling.

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This means that the integrated GPU inside of Lunar Lake will have faster performance through its new Xe2 GPU architecture, but also improved performance again through XeSS through the beefed-up XMX hardware on the SoC compared to Meteor Lake.

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With XeSS enabled and on Performance Mode, Lunar Lake is capable of a 62% performance improvement, and better yet, if you're hitting 80FPS to 100FPS, you could take the Quality Mode preset and enjoy a stable 60FPS with a better-looking game.

Intel wouldn't launch a new GPU architecture without mentioning ray tracing, with Xe2 packing 30% faster RT performance and a 99% percentile over 30FPS. The new Xe2 RT engine is a fully functional RT implementation, running through the DirectX12 Ultimate API.