Intel Lunar Lake iGPU With Xe2 “Battlemage” Architecture To Feature Adaptive Sharpening Filter Tech

Intel Lunar Lake CPUs with Xe2 "Battlemage" iGPU architecture launch later this year and will feature a host of new tech such as Adaptive Sharpening Filter.

The Intel Lunar Lake CPUs are going to be a major deal for the mainstream mobility and consumer "client" segment. They will be hosting a range of new technologies including an architecture that is designed from the ground up and focuses on performance/watt, 3x the AI NPU uplift and the latest Xe2 "Battlemage" iGPU architecture.

The Battlemage Xe2 GPU architecture is rounding up to be a massive uplift over the Alchemist line which made its debut with the Arc series for both desktops and notebooks. Now, Intel is prepping its Battlemage GPU architecture with a slew of new features among which is support for a brand new technology called Adaptive Sharpening Filter.

According to the latest Linux Kernel patches sent out by Intel, it looks like Xe2 "Battlemage" iGPUs for Lunar Lake CPUs will feature support for the new Adaptive Sharpening Filter technology which will essentially work through the display engine and apply sharpening within games or non-game use-cases such as videos and photos. According to the patch notes, the Filter will have a minimal performance and power impact and will be included within iGPUs featured on Lunar Lake and on-wards.

"Many a times images are blurred or upscaled content is also not as crisp as original rendered image. Traditional sharpening techniques often apply a uniform level of enhancement across entire image, which sometimes result in over-sharpening of some areas and potential loss of natural details.

Intel has come up with Display Engine based adaptive sharpening filter with minimal power and performance impact. From LNL onwards, the Display hardware can use one of the pipe scaler for adaptive sharpness filter. This can be used for both gaming and non-gaming use cases like photos, image viewing. It works on a region of pixels depending on the tap size.

This RFC is an attempt to introduce an adaptive sharpness solution which helps in improving the image quality. For this new CRTC property is added. The user can set this property with desired sharpness strength value with 0-255. A value of 1 representing minimum sharpening strength and 255 representing maximum sharpness strength. A strength value of 0 means no sharpening or sharpening feature disabled. It works on a region of pixels depending on the tap size. The coefficients are used to generate an alpha value which is used to blend the sharpened image to original image.

Userspace implementation for sharpening feature and IGT implementation is in progress."

Intel Linux Kernel Patches

One of the interesting notes about this feature is that it can be manually set from a value of 0-255 with 0 representing no sharpening, 1 representing minimal sharpening, and 255 representing a maximum amount of sharpening achieved through the Adaptive Sharpening Filter. The filter will be applied across a certain region depending on the tap size which may also be set by the users themselves. This new feature is said to provide better image quality without oversharpening the original image which is something that we see in traditional sharpening filters.

Given the large dependency on upscaling and frame-generation technologies which can hinder image quality to a certain extent and cause blurry images to be produced, this feature might be a godsend if it works properly. Handhelds and Mini PCs with Lunar Lake CPUs running the next-gen Xe2 "Battlemage" iGPUs will definitely leverage the new Adaptive Sharpening Filter tech and we can't wait to see it in action.

News Sources: Phoronix, Videocardz