Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake Xe2 GPU architecture rumored to get adaptive sharpening filter

Intel has teased the development of a new technology that will be featured in its next-gen Lunar Lake mobile CPU architecture, with new sharpening filters that are smarter than existing filters.

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Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake CPUs teased at CES 2024 (source: Intel)

The new approach would provide developers and gamers with the ability to tweak the sharpening effect on a per-region basis instead of applying sharpening to the entire image. Intel wants to focus on specific areas inside of the frame that wouldn't otherwise benefit from additional sharpening.

You don't want to oversharpen areas that don't require it, like backgrounds, for example, where this new sharpening filter would make games -- and even other apps -- have better image quality. An Intel engineer explained that adaptive sharpening won't just apply to games but to images and video software being run inside the operating system.

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Intel engineer Nemesa Garg eplained in the patch cover letter: "Many a times images are blurred or upscaled content is also not as crisp as original rendered image. Traditional sharpening techniques often apply a uniform level of enhancement across entire image, which sometimes result in over-sharpening of some areas and potential loss of natural details".

"Intel has come up with Display Engine based adaptive sharpening filter with minimal power and performance impact. From LNL onwards, the Display hardware can use one of the pipe scaler for adaptive sharpness filter. This can be used for both gaming and non-gaming use cases like photos, image viewing. It works on a region of pixels depending on the tap size".

"This RFC is an attempt to introduce an adaptive sharpness solution which helps in improving the image quality. For this new CRTC property is added. The user can set this property with desired sharpness strength value with 0-255. A value of 1 representing minimum sharpening strength and 255 representing maximum sharpness strength. A strength value of 0 means no sharpening or sharpening feature disabled. It works on a region of pixels depending on the tap size. The coefficients are used to generate an alpha value which is used to blend the sharpened image to original image".

"Userspace implementation for sharpening feature and IGT implementation is in progress".