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

When running vkpeak to stress the Vulkan compute capabilities of the integrated graphics, the Arc Graphics performance with the Core Ultra 7 155H was terrific! The upgrade over the Iris Xe Graphics with Alder Lake were huge and the Intel integrated graphics were now tending to match or outperform the RDNA3 integrated (Radeon 780M) graphics with the RDNA3 Phoenix laptop. Great showing on the Vulkan compute side with Meteor Lake.

For the initial integrated graphics benchmarks run, here is a look at the SoC power consumption over the entire span of tests conducted. The Core Ultra 7 155H on average was consuming 24 Watts to the Ryzen 7 7840U at a 25.8 Watt average. The peak consumption was also lower for Meteor Lake on the Acer Swift Go 14 with a 43.5 Watt peak compared to 51 Watts on the Framework 13. Not only was the Core Ultra 7 155H pulling slightly less power but it was a big upgrade over the Alder Lake MSI EVO laptop with the Core i7 1280P having a 36 Watt average and 67 Watt peak.

When taking the geometric mean of all the OpenGL/Vulkan benchmarks run on the three integrated graphics runs, the Core Ultra 7 155H was about 8% faster on average than the Radeon 780M RDNA3 graphics found with the Ryzen 7 7840U. Compared to the Alder Lake era Iris Xe graphics, the Meteor Lake graphics were an incredible 62% faster!

This was a terrific first showing for Intel Arc Graphics on Meteor Lake under Linux. I'll have more benchmarks soon -- including of the more popular Steam Play games and the like under Linux -- while this was just my initial graphics testing given the limited time I've had my hands on a Meteor Lake laptop. But in any event it's clear from these results that Arc Graphics with Core Ultra can compete or outperform AMD RDNA3 integrated graphics while leading in performance-per-Watt.

But wait there's more: let's look more at the Meteor Lake Arc Graphics compute performance.