Intel Demos F1 24 Running At 1080P 60 FPS On Lunar Lake’s Xe2 GPU With Ray Tracing & XeSS, Talks Frame-Gen & Architectural Fixes

Intel demoed its Xe2 GPU architecture in F1 24 during its Tech Tour while also discussing about XeSS, Frame Gen & architectural fixes in Battlemage.

During the Intel Technology Tour in Taipei, Intel showcased the very first gaming demo of its next-gen Lunar Lake CPUs, featuring the Xe2 GPU, running F1 24. This is a launch title that supports the XeSS technology and shows just how far Intel has come in the graphics segment, offering day-one support for its latest GPU features in a major AAA title.

The F1 24 demo was running on an undisclosed Lunar Lake CPU with the Xe2 GPU and it was running within the Lunar Lake power budget which is around 17W. The game was running at 1920x1080 resolution (FHD) using the High settings preset and had both XeSS Performance modes with ray-traced shadows enabled. The game was delivering a solid and smooth 60 FPS throughout the scene according to Intel, unfortunately, they didn't show any real-time FPS indicator for us to verify this claim but if true, then it's great news for thin and light platforms running in a low power envelope.

Lunar Lake Xe2 running F1 24 at FHD @ 60 FPS using XeSS pic.twitter.com/dM39X9qWN7

— Hassan Mujtaba (@hms1193) June 4, 2024

In another benchmark demo published by the folks over at PCWorld, you can see that the Xe2 GPU on Intel Lunar Lake chips offers the same performance in the 3DMark test while using much lower total power which again shows that Intel is on point when it says they have drastically reduced power & increase efficiency with Lunar Lake chips.

Thanks to @pcworld for showing us some Intel Lunar Lake benches. I went ahead and used the exact same settings Intel used in 3DMark but on AMD 8840U Hawk Point.

This is just a single test, but Lunar Lake looks as good as AMDs last generation.

???? 1/2 pic.twitter.com/nrEe9YCUVw

— Cary Golomb (@carygolomb) June 5, 2024

But besides these demos, TAP also gave us some detailed insight into what they learned from Alchemist, what Battlemage is going to offer, and what the future holds in terms of pixel/frame generation.

So for Xe2 GPUs, Intel will be offering new graphical experiences to everyone. It's not just a graphics architecture designed for small form factor but it's going to be for everyone on both discrete and integrated designs. This once again confirms what we had said in our Xe2 deep-dive that Xe2 is coming to Arc Battlemage graphics cards under the next-generation Arc lineup.

You're going to see more graphical experiences in windows desktops, snappier zippier stuff, great video playback and you can also play game. So it's not for small form factor, it's for everyone.

Tom Petersen - Intel

Talking about the road to Xe2 "Battlemage", Intel acknowledged that Alchemist was really in a sad state at the time of its launch. It required a lot of work, especially in terms of API, software & GPU driver support, but they have come a long way, and it's evident through recent drivers that Intel is committed to improving its graphics architectures with continued software developments. With Xe2, Intel states that it made tremendous amounts of fixes for compatibility and while DX was the dominant force in the past, with Xe2 they are going to offer even better support for the latest APIs.

When you think back to Alchemist and as new games launch we have a lot of issues and we required a lot of bug fixes and driver fixes and DX9 specifically required a lot of work and that is really a sad state at the time. But obviously, we learned from that and we made tremendous progress.

Now you're asking how does the hardware changes we made with Xe2 make it easier or harder. So the first statement is that we made a tremendous amount of fixes for compatibility all across the architecture so by its nature, we are more compliant with the dominant expectation which is different from being.

Back in the day, we were DX compliant which turns out to be not quite enough. You need to be similar to the dominant architecture and that's the direction that we are heading with Xe2.

Tom Petersen - Intel

Lastly, TAP presented a very different technique for pixel generation. He said that frame gen is a cool way of doing pixel generation but it's not the only way to achieve the result. While not dismissing the XeSS Frame Gen support entirely (We know its already in the works), TAP revealed a transformer-like pixel generation or to make things simple, more of a GenAI approach.

I love the different ways of generating pixels. Today, we support super res which is one way, the spatial way of generating pixels but obviously, there's many others. Ther's frame generation which is a temporal generation, right, and what you are saying is that I got the next one, I got the kernel, so why don't I calculate another one. Very cool technology and I think the experience can be kinda good.

It's got some problems, there are some things its not just good at but the overall experiences I think are a net positive so that's my feeling on frame gen. But more generally, I am very excited about other techniques of pixel generation and it doesn't end with frame get. Frame gen is kinda like a step along the way, a natural evolution, but I was actually talking about to another guy about what's the end game?

The end game for me is transformer like generation. So if you can imagine the communication between a game and the graphics subsystem. It doesn't naturally has to be directX calls, it could be something like, move a little bit left, and what we could do is synthesize that entire scene without explicit commands so that's more of a GenAI approach to graphics so that is not a plan but that's where my hearts at.

Tom Petersen - Intel

It will be interesting to see if GenAI can become a viable option for frame generation but given all of the advancements that are being made in the GenAI ecosystem, this is a likely scenario. It's certainly not going to come with Xe2 or Battlemage GPUs but maybe with future Celestial or Druid GPU architectures, we can see this vision become real.

If what's being shown and told about Xe2 GPUs is true, then it looks like the architecture can shape up to be quite the thing. Even if it doesn't match the highest-end NVIDIA performance, all it needs to do is offer mainstream gamers are solid performance out of the box with a great software and driver ecosystem while running the latest games without any issues. We look forward to Intel's next-gen graphics technologies.