Intel i915 vs. Xe Graphics Driver Benchmarks For Meteor Lake: Extra Performance In 2025
VKMark is one of the only graphics benchmarks with a clear-cut improvement for Meteor Lake on the Xe driver over the i915 driver.
The graphics performance benefits were limited in moving Meteor Lake graphics from i915 to Xe, but when it came to the GPU compute benchmarks there were often very significant improvements. The Xe kernel driver works a lot better with the Intel Compute Runtime stack than i915.
The Geekbench OpenCL benchmark also showed a huge advantage to using the Xe driver with this Core Ultra 7 155H laptop compared to the i915 default driver.
If you use Meteor Lake (or Alchemist) hardware and into GPU compute workloads, it's definitely worthwhile trying out the Xe Linux kernel driver.
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