Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake Graphics Performance Disappoints On Linux

While I have been very eager to test out the Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake series on Linux in part due to the new Xe2 integrated graphics, after several days of pushing a new Lunar Lake laptop on Linux the results have been very disappointing. Besides needing a very leading-edge software stack to enjoy the Xe2 accelerated graphics out-of-the-box, the performance currently is poor. It's a fraction of the Windows performance and currently falls behind the Meteor Lake graphics performance and in turn also being well behind the AMD RDNA3.5 competition with the Ryzen AI 300 series laptops.

Graphics driver optimizations for the open-source Intel Linux stack will presumably come with time, but the launch-day Linux graphics performance is disappointing. It's clear there are some big missed opportunities with the Linux performance coming in much slower than Microsoft Windows 11 and to the point that prior generation Xe graphics with Meteor Lake are faster.

My initial Linux testing of Lunar Lake has been using an ASUS Zenbook S 14 that I pre-ordered. Unfortunately Intel had not supplied Phoronix with any review sample but I was eager to test out Lunar Lake on Linux and thus resorted to ordering the ASUS Zenbook S 14 UX5406SA with Core Ultra 256V SoC.

This $1399 USD laptop features the Core Ultra 7 256V, 16GB of memory, 1TB NVMe SSD, and a 14-inch 3K OLED display. The Core Ultra 7 256V is an 8-core SoC made up of four P cores and four E cores, a 2.2GHz base frequency, 4.8GHz max turbo frequency, and a 17 Watt base power consumption. There is 16GB of LPDDDR5X-8533 memory and the Arc Graphics A40V running at 1.95GHz and having 8 Xe cores.

I was excited at first when booting the Ubuntu 24.10 daily ISO with the ASUS Zenbook S 14 that the display lit-up and there was even working WiFi... No WiFi troubles to deal with as is routinely still common with some newer laptop models. The Intel Arc Graphics 140V were even working out-of-the-box. Ubuntu 24.10 is using the Linux 6.11 kernel but they've patched their Xe driver code to enable Lunar Lake graphics to work out-of-the-box with their Linux 6.11 + Mesa 24.2 driver stack.

I'll have CPU/system benchmarks for the Core Ultra 256V article in the coming days while today's article is just an initial look at the Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics performance.

While initially excited by the Zenbook S 14 UX5406SA working with Ubuntu 24.10 and even having the Lunar Lake graphics with Ubuntu's Linux 6.11 kernel build, the performance thus far has been distrastous. Initially I tested with Ubuntu 24.10's Linux 6.11 and Mesa 24.2 driver stack but then again I repeated with using the Linux 6.12 Git kernel as of Sunday (effectively the Linux 6.12-rc1 state) paired with Mesa 24.3-devel from the Oibaf PPA. Even with riding the very latest Git state, the Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics performance was a wreck.

Results in this article are Meteor Lake vs. Lunar Lake vs. RDNA3.5 integrated graphics performance and then followed by Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux graphics performance on Lunar Lake. Again, the Lunar Lake Linux CPU/system test results will be in follow-up articles later this week.