Intel has been faltering consistently over the last few months. From instability problems to power efficiency, the company has been losing ground to AMD and Qualcomm, with a commitment to "five nodes in four years" set to be completed by the end of next year. However, one thing Intel hasn't been getting credit for is its GPUs, with the integrated GPUs in Lunar Lake and in Arrow Lake being some of the best-integrated GPUs that we've ever seen.

Intel is no stranger to powerful GPUs

Arc GPUs were sleeper budget options for new builds

Intel launched a range of dedicated GPU cards in 2022, with the Intel Arc A770 being the cream of the crop and promising performance on par with the RTX 3060. While rumors have been back and forth on whether we should expect another dedicated Intel GPU in the future (and how many of them), it seems that Intel's new Battlemage cards will ship sometime in the next few months.

Intel’s next-gen Xe2 graphics architecture forms the basis of Battlemage, and it debuted with Lunar Lake. The Arc 140V integrated GPU can go toe to toe with, and even beat, AMD's Radeon 890M which is inside the Ryzen AI 9 HX370 Strix Point APU. We're not expecting to see a high-end Battlemage GPU right away, with reports suggesting that Intel is targeting entry-level and mid-range performance.

According to Moore's Law is Dead, Intel may take a failure of Battlemage as an indication that it should then go on to cancel Celestial's dedicated GPUs, the expected architecture successor to Battlemage. Despite that, the company has clearly been doing well in the GPU space, and its integrated GPUs are a sign of the advancements that Intel has been making. While the company's first-gen dedicated GPUs (dubbed Alchemist) suffered from poor drivers at launch, things steadily improved to the point that those cards ended up being viable alternatives to the duopoly of AMD and Nvidia.

All of this is to say that Intel's advancements in graphics have clearly assisted the company in improving its overall graphics performance, most notably in integrated GPUs. Even if the company bows out of the dedicated GPU market in the future, its integrated GPUs will continue to go strong even just to power its laptop chips, if nothing else. As already mentioned, Intel has been building some fantastic integrated GPUs so far, with the Dell XPS 13 powered by Intel Lunar Lake being an excellent example of the fantastic graphics performance that they're capable of.

It's easy to overlook the good work that Intel is doing

GPUs were never the problem

Despite all of the problems that Intel has been facing recently, those problems are more or less exclusive to the company's CPUs. GPUs were never the problem, and they've been very good components in the price range that they've been aimed at. They're no competitor to the likes of the RTX 4080 or 4090, but they were never claimed to be, either.

Intel is also very aware of how powerful its GPUs have been, with the GPU power of Lunar Lake being a large component of the company's marketing. Intel's Lunar Lake GPU has eight Intel Xe cores, alongside eight ray tracing cores. Intel also has some pretty major throughput improvements with this generation of Core Ultra chips and Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) is the company's DLSS competitor so that you can upscale your games.

Finally, this is the first DirectX 12 Ultimate graphics processor to leverage LPDDR memory on the same package. Intel knows what it's doing when it comes to graphics and always has, it just never has tried to compete on the same level as Nvidia or AMD. Lunar Lake's GPU performance is also a great sign for Battlemage overall, though keep in mind that comparisons to AMD are versus AMD's RDNA3 when RDNA4 is expected in early 2025. Plus, the Lunar Lake graphics tile is made on TSMC, whereas dedicated Battlemage GPUs will probably be made using an Intel process.

No matter what, Intel has been building some sleeper GPUs, and it's very possible that those GPUs will manifest into some of the best-dedicated GPUs aimed at the lower to mid-range price bracket. Not everything is bad for Intel, and with Lunar Lake showing signs of greatness, things might be on the up for Team Blue.