We benchmarked Intel’s Lunar Lake GPU with Core Ultra 9 — drivers still holding back Arc Graphics 140V performance

Intel officially released its Lunar Lake mobile processors today, and we have a review of the Asus Zenbook S14 with the Core Ultra 7 258V. This is supposed to be the new king of laptop processors, with improved battery life being a key element. But it’s also the showcase for Intel’s latest GPU architecture, and while no integrated graphics solution will rank among the best graphics cards and these aren’t positioned as gaming laptops, we want to see how Intel’s latest stacks up against the competition.

The Core Ultra 9 288V comes with Intel Arc Graphics 140V, with the V indicating the power level of the chip. It’s a nominal 30W part with a maximum turbo power of 37W. We’re using the Core Ultra 9 in order to potentially remove power restrictions that might impact the Core Ultra 7 258V, with the hope of seeing higher, more consistent performance. This is also the debut of Intel’s Battlemage GPU architecture, sort of — power limits and shared memory will be major limiting factors for any GPU workload.

To see what Lunar Lake and Battlemage bring to the table, we’ll compare the new processor with the previous generation Meteor Lake chip along with AMD’s Ryzen AI chip. Here’s the quick rundown of core specs for the various chips we’re looking at.

What should be clear from the above table is that the three laptops we have for testing are not equivalent in a variety of ways. There are slightly different power targets, different core counts, different tiers (Core Ultra 7/9 and Ryzen 9), different memory, and other places where they don’t match up. There are also wildly different NPUs in play for AI workloads and even wildly different AI capabilities for the GPUs.

But I’m mostly interested in the graphics performance, so that will be the focus. And even here, we have some interesting changes relative to the previous generation Meteor Lake GPU. Both have eight Xe-cores (roughly similar to an AMD Compute Unit, aka CU), but where Meteor Lake’s Arc Xe GPU omitted the XMX functionality, Lunar Lake’s Arc Xe2 includes that. It should allow for better XeSS upscaling quality and performance; otherwise, we don’t expect that to make much of a difference in graphics performance.

The Lunar Lake GPU also has a peak clock speed of just 2.05 GHz, down 200 MHz from Meteor Lake’s 2.25 GHz and way, way below AMD’s potential 2.9 GHz. AMD also has twice as many graphics clusters (CUs) as Intel, giving peak theoretical compute of 5.94 TFLOPS. That’s basically triple the 2.1 TFLOPS on Lunar Lake and more than double Meteor Lake’s 2.3 TFLOPS. But theoretical TFLOPS are rarely the whole story.

All three laptops support DDR5 (or LPDDR5) memory, but the actual memory used is often up to the laptop vendors — though not on Lunar Lake. We’re using Asus Zenbook models in all three cases, and both the Meteor Lake and Strix Point models have DDR5 running at 7500 MT/s (the MTL says 7467 MT/s, but close enough). With dual-channel memory that works out to 120 GB/s of raw memory bandwidth — a far cry from what you get with even a modest dedicated GPU, but it should be reasonably sufficient for a laptop with integrated graphics. The new Lunar Lake laptop has 8533 MT/s LPDDR5X memory integrated onto the package, yielding a moderately higher 136.5 GB/s of bandwidth.

As I said, we’re looking at apples and oranges in some respects, as there are many differences in the core specifications. Still, it’s what we have available, so let’s go ahead and run some gaming and graphics benchmarks to see where things land.

First up is 3DMark Time Spy. I don’t like using synthetic benchmarks for normal GPU testing, but in this case it’s a reasonable way to try and remove driver issues from the equation. Every GPU manufacturer should be intimately familiar with 3DMark, and ensuring the drivers work optimally is standard procedure. If the drivers are fully tuned for any games that we test, we’d expect the results to at least echo what Time Spy shows.

And what it shows is that, despite having theoretically less GPU compute available, Lunar Lake’s Battlemage GPU comes out on top. It’s not massively faster than the other chips, but it shows 13% higher performance than the Radeon 980M when both are using the MyAsus Performance mode fan profile (which we think also increases the TDP limits). Compared to the previous generation MTL GPU, it’s also 14% faster.

Putting all three laptops into the Standard mode fan profile does change things a bit. All three laptops run slower, but the Lunar Lake GPU is now only 5% faster than the 980M, but still 12% ahead of the Meteor Lake GPU.

One critical item to point out is that memory bandwidth on Lunar Lake is 13–14 percent higher than on the other two laptops, so instead of showing true gaming potential, 3DMark Time Spy might actually end up scaling more with bandwidth. Some games do behave that way, but plenty of others depend more on the GPU computational abilities rather than bandwidth.

Black Myth Wukong is a recent release, which makes it a good showcase for how much drivers can matter. We’re using Intel’s latest preview drivers for the Lunar Lake system, AMD’s 24.8.1 drivers on the Ryzen AI / Strix Point laptop, and the latest publicly available Intel 6077 drivers for Meteor Lake. (6078/5736 drivers just came out today for the retail Lunar Lake launch, but we used 6077 from late last week.)

These results stand in stark contrast to 3DMark, obviously. Lunar Lake now sits at the very bottom of the charts, followed by Meteor Lake in the middle, with AMD’s Strix Point Radeon 980M absolutely destroying them. We are testing at 1080p medium with quality mode upscaling and frame generation enabled, so potentially AMD gets more benefit from FSR3 than the Intel GPUs, but the game is otherwise not really playable at 1080p.

The Radeon 980M offers twice the performance of the Arc Graphics in MTL in performance mode and is still 71% faster in standard mode. It’s also 2.4 times faster than Arc Graphics 140V in LNL for performance mode, and over twice as fast in standard mode. Note that it’s a 16-inch laptop as well, so the higher fan speeds really can amount to a lot more headroom becoming available.

Cyberpunk 2077 has been around for a while, but it just (finally) received the promised FSR3 support, which we’ve opted again to enable on all three chips. Framegen boosts performance around 70~80 percent in most cases, taking some of the laptops from the sub-30 range to a perceived 50+ fps. It’s not perfect by any means, but for integrated GPUs, it can be the difference between a playable experience and a stuttering mess.

The Radeon 980M once again demolishes the competition. It’s 47% faster than MTL in performance mode and 27% faster in standard mode — so in this case, engaging the performance mode fan profile in the MyAsus app boosts performance by over 40%. Again, chassis size looks to be a factor, with the MTL laptop showing a 24% boost in performance while the newer LNL laptop gets a 14% boost.

Here, the Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake GPUs end up being roughly equivalent. While LNL comes out slightly faster in standard mode, it’s still slightly slower in performance mode. Overall, there’s not much benefit from the Xe2 / Battlemage on display, but that doesn’t tell us too much about what might happen with desktop variants.

Last, we have Shadow of the Tomb Raider, an older game that should be good and fully optimized for any reasonable drivers. And, interestingly, we get a chart that looks more like 3DMark. There’s no upscaling in use this time, so that might also help explain why AMD’s chip doesn’t zoom past the competition.

Overall, the Core Ultra 9 288V takes top honors with 51 fps in performance mode and 41 fps in standard mode. That’s also the biggest improvement from engaging the higher speed fan mode, a 24% increase. The Core Ultra 7 155H only increased by 14%, while the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 saw a 15% increase.

The net result is that Lunar Lake comes out 13% ahead of Strix Point with both performance modes but only 5% ahead in standard mode. It’s also 21% faster than Meteor Lake in performance mode and 11% faster in standard mode.

First Impressions of Lunar Lake’s Arc Xe2 Graphics

Do your best Obi-wan impression and wave your hand in the air while saying, “These aren’t the results you’re looking for.” That’s basically how I’m feeling right now with Lunar Lake. Graphics performance should be clearly higher than Meteor Lake, or at least that was our expectation going into these tests. For now, the results are a very mixed bag, with echoes of the early Arc GPU teething pains of 2022.

The one new/recent game that we tested (for now) showed very odd performance results. With the standard fan profile set in the MyAsus app, it ran horribly slow in Black Myth Wukong — it’s only a bit more than half as fast as its predecessor. Turning on the performance fan profile made a world of difference, though it still ended up trailing MTL slightly.

The Cyberpunk 2077 results look about right. Lunar Lake has faster memory with more bandwidth and a reworked architecture but lower clocks. That sounds like performance should be roughly the same, perhaps faster if the architectural updates boost graphics throughput enough, and that’s what CP77 showed.

The other two tests result in more favorable standings for Intel’s new integrated GPU. 3DMark has Lunar Lake ahead of even AMD’s top Radeon 980M iGPU, as does Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Neither test used any form of upscaling, which might partially account for the discrepancies in other tests. It’s certainly something we want to investigate more in the coming days.

Not shown in the charts, we also ran the same graphics tests on the ‘lesser’ Core Ultra 7 258V. The main differences between that chip and the Core Ultra 9 288V are the base power (17W vs 30W) and maximum clocks (100 MHz higher for the GPU clock on 288V). In our testing, at least in the standard fan mode, the two chips are within spitting distance of each other on our graphics tests. So, you can safely opt for the slower and less expensive Lunar Lake chip and only give up a very small amount of performance.

Overall, the graphics performance from Lunar Lake and the Arc Graphics 140V, aka Arc Xe2 Battlemage, doesn’t look particularly amazing. But then, we didn’t expect to see much since we’re dealing with integrated graphics. Power and memory bandwidth constraints often eclipse other factors. We’ve seen claims of double the performance (or at least performance per watt) on various integrated GPU solutions in the past, and those rarely pan out in the real world. With its current focus on ultraportable, low voltage, long battery life laptops, this is hardly the best showcase for Intel’s next-generation GPU architecture.

We can only hope that the results will be far more competitive when dedicated Battlemage GPUs begin shipping. We also hope that driver issues, which remain an ongoing concern, continue to get resolved. Intel has improved in that area since the initial Arc launch, but AMD and Nvidia remain far more consistent in both game support and performance. There are times when Lunar Lake might come out ahead of AMD’s Radeon 980M, but we suspect that over a larger test suite, Intel will encounter far more frequent anomalies in terms of game support and optimizations.