Intel Integrated Graphics Performance From Gen9 To Meteor Lake Arc Graphics

With my Intel Meteor Lake benchmarking that began last week with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H within an Acer Swift Go 14 laptop, the area I've been most impressed by so far with this new generation of Intel mobile processors is the integrated Arc Graphics performance. In a prior article I showed how Intel Meteor Lake graphics are a big upgrade and now competing with AMD RDNA3 integrated graphics while also capable of delivering better power efficiency. That led me to some curiosity-driven holiday benchmarking to show how Meteor Lake graphics have evolved over the past several generations of Intel mobile processors.

With this article is a look at how far Intel integrated graphics have evolved since the days of the very common "Gen9" graphics found for several generations since Intel Skylake. Due to delays with Cannon Lake and then Ice Lake processors and all the Skylake derivatives, Gen9 graphics were around quite a while and still can be found in use on many aging systems... Thus a good reference point for seeing how it compares to the Meteor Lake processor graphics now available at the end of 2023.

For this article based on the laptops I have available for testing, I ran fresh Intel integrated graphics testing on:

Core i7 8565U - The Whiskey Lake processor with Iris UHD Gen9 graphics from 2018. The Core i7 8565U was running within a Dell XPS 13 9380 laptop.

Core i7 1065G7 - The Ice Lake processor from late 2019 with Intel Iris Plus "Gen11" graphics. The Ice Lake CPU was within the Dell XPS 13 7390 laptop.

Core i7 1165G7 - The Tiger Lake processor from 2020 with Intel Iris Xe "Gen12" graphics. The Tiger Lake CPU was within the Dell XPS 13 9310.

Core i7 1280P - The Alder Lake processor from 2022 with Iris Xe "Gen12" graphics. The Alder Lake CPU was within a MSI Prestige 14 Evo laptop.

Core 7 Ultra 155H - The new Meteor Lake processor with Intel Arc Graphics. The Meteor Lake CPU was within the Acer Swift Go 14 that debuted on Meteor Lake's launch day earlier this month.

All laptops had 16GB of RAM and were running Ubuntu 23.10 with the Linux 6.7-rc5 kernel and running Mesa 24.0-devel Git as of this week from the Oibaf PPA. All of these laptops happened to have a $1000~1200 USD price tag around their launch. Again, the comparison was limited by the particular laptops/CPUs I had available locally for testing.

In addition to the raw graphics performance in this brief comparison, the performance per Watt based on the CPU SoC power readings were also generated for this comparison.