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

In addition to the Intel Core Ultra integrated Arc Graphics competing with AMD RDNA3 integrated graphics and delivering huge generational advantages and leading power efficiency, another great aspect is the open-source GPU compute support and overall software ecosystem. The Intel Meteor Lake processors enjoy support already by the Intel Compute-Runtime stack providing OpenCL 3.0 support as well as oneAPI Level Zero support. Loading up the existing Intel Compute Runtime, oneAPI Level Zero Loader, and IGC with the existing upstream Linux 6.7 yielded the Arc Graphics GPU compute support "just working" without any fuss. In comparison, AMD doesn't officially support ROCm on their integrated graphics products with the with the official support at least for ROCm on consumer Radeon GPUs being a mess... Not to mention the ROCm binaries catering just to a set of enterprise Linux distributions/versions. So in the case of loading up the Intel Compute Runtime atop Ubuntu 23.10 with Linux 6.7 and having everything just work as intended is terrific.

The Intel Meteor Lake integrated graphics also now worked with Blender 4.0's SYCL/L0 support thanks to the Arc Graphics architecture and was also running for other SYCL workloads that previously didn't run or struggled with earlier Intel integrated graphics generations.

For an idea of the Intel Compute Runtime performance in going from the Core i7 1280P Alder Lake to the Core Ultra 7 155H Meteor Lake, here's a look:

For the Hashcat OpenCL benchmarks the Core Ultra 7 155H was delivering huge improvements to raw performance while consuming much less power.

The SHOC OpenCL tests also showed the impressive improvements found with Meteor Lake's Arc Graphics.

In a follow-up article I'll do a larger GPU compute comparison going back even further in showing how the Meteor Lake graphics performance compares to that of older generations of Intel hardware back to the long-used Gen9 graphics.

And the Meteor Lake graphics were working well in other oneAPI SYCL benchmarks now thanks to the updated graphics architecture.

Going from Alder Lake to Meteor Lake more than doubled the GPU compute performance all the while consuming less power!

The GPU compute performance and the graphics benchmarks earlier in this article were terrific with Meteor Lake. The great Intel Arc Graphics performance with Meteor Lake is rather the complete opposite of yesterday's look at the CPU side performance. Sadly with the Meteor Lake CPU performance the 22-thread SoC was losing rather badly to the Ryzen 7 7840U both in raw performance and power efficiency. See the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H Meteor Lake vs. AMD Ryzen 7 7840U On Linux In 300+ CPU Benchmarks if you missed it.

Meteor Lake's CPU performance was a let down while the integrated Arc Graphics have been fantastic and exceeding my expectations. Just remember though if you are planning to setup a Meteor Lake laptop for Linux soon, you'll want/need to be using a very fresh Linux kernel and Mesa for adequate graphics driver support.

More Intel Core Ultra 7 Linux benchmarks to come on Phoronix. One of the next pieces coming up is digging into the Meteor Lake NPU with benchmarks as well as exploring the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance.

Update (21 Dec): The Windows 11 vs. Linux benchmarks are now published for the Intel Core Ultra 7.