Intel showcases gaming performance of Lunar Lake Xe2 iGPU with ray tracing and XeSS

[Redaktion]

The very first gaming demo of Xe2 iGPU is here. Intel demoed it at its Tech Tour while introducing the new Lunar Lake processors. The demo only ran one game, F1 2024, and with ray tracing and XeSS, the integrated graphics card could run the game at 60 FPS at 1080p and High settings.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-showcases-gaming-performance-of-Lunar-Lake-Xe2-iGPU-with-ray-tracing-and-XeSS.845185.0.html

[Julian M]

In classic Intel fashion, numbers don't add up and real-world performance won't be anything close to these promises.

That said, I'll at the very least aknowledge they are making good progress on their iGPUs - still not as good as AMD's, but greatly improving from one gen to another.

[NikoB]

I personally don't care about games and the shame of all three companies NVidia/AMD/Intel is that despite the fact that the Display Port 2.0 standard was adopted back in 2019, even in NVidia solutions with fast vram it is still missing from the chips .

And the x86 platform, with its shameful 128-bit memory controller, is several years behind the requirements for 8K monitors even in 2D work.

All that is needed today for an almost perfect picture on the screen is 8k@120Hz in 2D, but to the shame of the IT industry, at the moment there is not even a protocol for transmitting such a volume of information, and there is practically nowhere to output 8k@60Hz even in the professional series of AMD video cards, where they first appeared DP2.1 ports with UHBR20.

And 220+ ppi is much more important for humanity as a whole than games for young and adult nerds. Especially considering that the evil corporation - Google (Alphabet) has been deliberately damaging the eyesight of PC/laptop owners for more than 7 years due to deliberately incorrect font smoothing starting from version 50 of Chrome, whose screens do not reach 220-230 ppi, and this is almost all monitors, except for rare 6K models from Dell in the past and rare 4K screens in laptops.

It's not games that people need, but 220 ppi+ on all screens WITHOUT exceptions. Even if ordinary people, due to their technical illiteracy, do not understand this.

[Joe]

Are these ray tracing and XeSS hardware features completely useless when turned off in game? Or are they used for other gaming related calculations then?
Lunar Lake iGPU size looks same as Meteor Lake H iGPU, so expecting more compute power. But if they used extra space (from TSMC 5nm to N3B) for extra features that is not used, then can it actually be more performing than Meteor Lake H iGPU?
Intel likes to compare it 165U iGPU, not H-series.

[Hotz]

Meteor Lake seems like the AMD Vega 8 iGPU moment (which performed well given enough power)
Lunar Lake seems like the AMD RDNA2 680m iGPU moment (which performed 50% better with the same power)

Intel is becoming competitive... but a behind in the timeline

[RobertJasiek]

If all the PR promises become true.

[Hotz]

The game demo focused on one title, however, which is the recently released F1 24.... Lunar Lake CPU with its Xe2 integrated graphics card can run F1 24 at 60 FPS at 1080p. Intel mentioned that the game was running at High settings preset with ray tracing turned on and XeSS in Performance mode.

According to the Notebookcheck Test, the Meteor Lake iGPU also runs it at High settings with 53 fps. So not much difference.

www.notebookcheck.net/F1-24-review-Laptop-and-desktop-benchmarks.844288.0.html

Ok, but the demo uses raytracing - however with using XeSS v1.3 Performance Mode. This has an upscaling factor of 2.3x, which makes the original render resolution only 835x470. That's veeeery low. No surprise it works when everything is blurry. I'm also pretty sure Meteor Lake would achieve a very similar performance.

Besides, RT on or off doesn't even make a difference as per this video.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5UBat7oz0I

[Hotz]

Btw. it's not my purpose to provoke a discussion about Raytracing good or not,
I'm merely pointing out that the game chosen by Intel wasn't a good choice: neither for demonstrating Raytracing, nor for demonstrating the alleged improvement from Meteor Lake.