Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake Graphics Performance Disappoints On Linux
First up is a look at how the Core Ultra 7 256V graphics performance compares to the prior generation Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 155H within an Acer Swift Go 14 and then against the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with RDNA3.5 graphics within an ASUS Zenbook S 16. All laptops were tested using Ubuntu 24.10 daily and then the additional run on Lunar Lake also with the very latest Git state.
Wow, this isn't what I was expecting when eagerly pre-ordering a Lunar Lake laptop...
The Radeon 890M RDNA3.5 graphics of the Ryzen AI 300 series was much faster while the Lunar Lake performance was a big performance drop compared to Meteor Lake on Linux.
Straight-up: the Lunar Lake graphics performance was disappointing. The Lunar Lake graphics heavily trailed even prior generation Meteor Lake, likely due to Linux driver deficiencies. We'll see what Lunar Lake / Xe2 graphics performance optimizations come in the weeks/months ahead but for launch-day performance it was well below expectations in trailing Meteor Lake.
On a performance-per-Watt basis the Core Ultra 7 256V power consumption was lower than the Core Ultra 7 155H but that it only put its performance-per-Watt to being comparable to the Radeon RDNA3.5 graphics.