Intel Meteor Lake Arc Graphics: A Fantastic Upgrade, Battles AMD RDNA3 Integrated Graphics

Yesterday I posted the first Intel Meteor Lake Linux benchmarks that were focused on the CPU capabilities with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H on Ubuntu Linux compared to the existing AMD Ryzen 7 7840U. The strictly CPU core performance ended up being rather disappointing with the AMD Zen 4 laptop dominating in most cases at similar or better power efficiency. But where things become much more interesting -- and competitive -- with Meteor Lake is on the integrated graphics side now featuring Arc Graphics. The benchmarks today is our first look at the new Meteor Lake Arc Graphics with the Core 7 Ultra 155H while comparing it to the RDNA3 integrated graphics found with the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U as well as the prior generation Intel integrated graphics.

The Intel Core 7 Ultra features Intel Arc Graphics with a maximum dynamic frequency of 2.25GHz and packing in 8 Xe cores. The integrated Arc Graphics are ray-tracing capable, DisplayPort 2.1 and HDMI 2.1 are supported for connected displays, 4K @ 60 and even 8K @ 60 is capable, built-in AV1 encode/decode, and all around similar architectural capabilities to the DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics.

As with Intel integrated graphics over the past two decades, the Meteor Lake graphics continue to be supported by open-source drivers on Linux. Open-source and upstream, no binary blobs to worry about unless counting the linux-firmware.git contents for the necessary graphics firmware. The Meteor Lake Arc Graphics also work with the open-source Intel Compute Runtime for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support as we've enjoyed with prior generations too -- benchmarks on the GPU compute side later in this article.

I have been very happy with my Meteor Lake graphics testing on Linux the past few days using the Acer Swift Go 14. But the one caveat is you must be running a recent Linux distribution / very up-to-date kernel and Mesa support. In particular, Linux 6.6+ but Linux 6.7 Git has even more fixes/improvements, Mesa 23.2 or newer, and recent linux-firmware.git for the firmware support.

It was only in Linux 6.6 where Meteor Lake graphics were declared stable and enabled by default. There exists Meteor Lake support in prior kernel versions if using the "i915.force_probe=[ID]" override, but for best support you are basically expected to be running Linux 6.6 or better yet using Linux 6.7 that will be released as stable around the end of December. Similarly, Mesa 23.2 has all the necessary bits in place for MTL Arc Graphics but if using the new Mesa 23.3 stable series or Mesa 24.0-devel will be more improvements and optimizations.

So you must be comfortable upgrading your system or running a rolling-release Linux distribution to have the best open-source driver support. Or if you are not in a rush to upgrade your Linux laptop, by the time of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and other H1'2024 Linux distribution releases, at that point there should be the pleasant out-of-the-box Meteor Lake graphics support.

For the purposes of today's testing all of the graphics hardware being tested was using Linux 6.7-rc5 along with the Mesa 24.0-devel Git state as of this week from the Oibaf PPA for easy reproducibility. All of the latest linux-firmware.git firmware support was also present.

Given that I bought the Acer Swift Go 14 retail on launch day, I've only had a few days so far with Meteor Lake. Thus in today's article is a very early look at the integrated Arc Graphics performance but already the data speaks volumes for the Intel integrated graphics experience now capable with Meteor Lake.

The Arc Graphics with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H on the Acer Swift Go 14 was compared to the Framework 13 AMD laptop with the RDNA3-based Radeon RX 780M graphics found with the Ryzen 7 7840U that features 12 graphics cores and a graphics frequency of 2.7GHz. For additional perspective, there is also the results from the prior Core i7 1280P with MSI EVO laptop that features Iris Xe Graphics with up to a 1.45GHz graphics clock and 96 execution units for a look at the prior generation Intel integrated graphics. Unfortunately I don't have any Raptor Lake laptop and thus using the similar Alder Lake i7-1280P for that prior generation comparison point.

The Intel Arc Graphics (Meteor Lake), AMD Phoenix (RDNA3), and Intel Iris Xe Graphics (Alder Lake) were all tested with Ubuntu 23.10 with the Linux 6.7-rc5 and Mesa 24.0-devel upgrade for all having their newest open-source driver support. All the CPU SoC power consumption numbers were read from the RAPL/PowerCap interface. Let's see how the Intel Arc Graphics with Meteor Lake laptops are looking on Linux...