Arc Xe2 Battlemage Graphics

Intel's iGPU for Lunar Lake is the first from the company based on the new Xe2 Battlemage graphics architecture. It offers a 50% gain in gaming performance compared to the Xe-LPG iGPU powering the Meteor Lake processor. This is on the back of a next-generation Xe core with increased IPC and an updated Vector engine.


The Xe core is the basic indivisible compute element of the iGPU. It packs eight 512-bit vector engines, 8 2048-bit XMX matrix math engines, support for 64-bit atomic ops, and increased 192 KB L1 cache per SLM.


The biggest architectural change with the Xe2 iGPU on Lunar Lake is the introduction of the matrix extension engine (XMX), something the iGPU implementations of Xe Alchemist lacked. With 8 Xe2 cores on tap, the iGPU enjoys 1,024 unified shaders, its XMX units add up to 67 TOPS of AI performance (not to be clubbed with the AI TOPS of the NPU). The iGPU also meets the full DirectX 12 Ultimate spec, and features 8 next-generation ray tracing units.


The media engine sees hardware acceleration support for AV1 encoding and decoding; and introduces support for VVC hardware decoding. VVC or H.266 reduces file-size by just 10% at iso-quality compared to AV1, but supports adaptive resolution, and 360-degree panoramic viewports.


The display engine supports the new eDisplayPort 1.5 standard, with improvements to panel self-refresh, selective update, and adaptive sync with panel replay. Also supported are DisplayPort 2.1 and HDMI 2.1.