Intel i915 vs. Xe Graphics Driver Benchmarks For Meteor Lake: Extra Performance In 2025
Last month I provided a fresh look at the Intel Arc A-Series graphics between the i915 and Xe kernel graphics drivers for Linux systems. The aging i915 driver is the default for the Alchemist GPUs but there is "experimental" support with the modern Xe kernel graphics driver. There were some performance advantages for the Arc A-Series if switching over to that newer driver option. Similarly, there are advantages with Meteor Lake too when moving from the i915 to Xe Linux drivers. Here are benchmarks to quantify that advantage.
With Lunar Lake integrated graphics and Battlemage discrete graphics, the Xe kernel driver is used by default on Linux systems. But like with the Alchemist dGPUs, Meteor Lake is the last iGPU generation that used i915 by default. But the modern Xe kernel driver does support Meteor Lake and on recent versions of the Linux kernel it can be made to use it at boot time via manipulating the i915.force_probe= and xe.force_probe= module parameters to disable/enable the given driver based on your graphics PCI device ID.
👁 Meteor Lake with i915 driver
Today's article is looking at the performance of the Intel Meteor Lake graphics using a Core Ultra 7 155H with the Acer Swift 14 laptop. The Linux 6.17 Git kernel was in use along with Mesa 25.3 and the latest Intel Compute Runtime. The only software change made between runs was switching from the default i915 kernel driver over to using the Xe kernel driver.
This is a straight-forward comparison of the Meteor Lake graphics between i915 and Xe drivers on Linux 6.17 so let's get straight to the data.