Intel's next graphics architecture, Xe2, will be more widely compatible with the game and less clunky, Intel fellow Tom Petersen said The xe2 improvements announced so far have been designed to fix issues that are currently widely reported on Arc discrete graphics cards. This includes many things designed specifically for the user. But they have also designed and put it in line with the more popular architecture of the day. 

The new Xe2 architecture that powers Intel's latest Lunar Lake processors is the same as the one expected to arrive inside the Battlemage graphics card. Lunar Lake will appear in Q3 later this year, but it's still unwise as to when Battlemage will be released. 

At the Lunar Lake event, Petersen talks about what you can expect from the upcoming graphics architecture."If you think back to Alchemist, when a new game is launched, there will be a lot of issues and a lot of bug fixes and driver fixes. And DX9 requires a lot of work in particular.

"We've made a huge amount of modifications for compatibility across the architecture. So, by its nature, let's call it more, conforming to the prevailing expectations.

These changes take various forms, but they are said to be not only improvements to the software stack, but also modifications to the silicon itself to make it more easily gelled in modern games. 

There is hardware support for commonly used commands such as execute indirect, which can be a headache and slow performance in alchemist. Another command, Fast Clear, is now supported by Xe2 hardware, rather than emulating it in software like Alchemist. The move of THE VECTOR ENGINE, THE CORE BLOCK OF INTEL'S GPU, FROM SIMD8 TO SIMD16 is also being made, WHICH SHOULD help improve efficiency. Along with further improvements for bandwidth and, importantly, utilization.

"Think of Xe2 as a next-generation GPU architecture designed to be highly game-compatible and highly utilized," says Petersen.

The main expectation that Petersen speaks of is a kind of graphics programming zeitgeist - whatever it is that has been done. As Petersen explains later, what has been done with graphics is the "dominant architecture" - that is, what Nvidia does.

"In the days when we were compliant with DX, it turned out not to be enough. You need to be similar to the dominant architecture. And that's the direction we're heading for Xe.

In an attempt to back up these claims, Intel brought the f1 24 to the event and showed it would work smoothly on Lunar Lake's new eight Xe-core GPU. It was running in 1080p, with ray-traced shadows, and XeSS was enabled. I could not see the machine playing the game, but it could have been a development kit. Still, ray-traced shadows on thin and light mobile processors are not bad thanks to the improved ray-tracing unit (Rtu) within xe2. This should also lead to material improvements in Ray Tracing Battlemage.

On top of that, Petersen points out that f1 is running smoothly on Lunar Lake on the game's release date of 24.

"This is a whole new game. And it's actually a brand new

on launch day on our graphics card where Intel has tremendous performance and tremendous progress "over 60 frames per second, and with XeSS you get a smooth and seamless experience.""

This is coming for Battlemage, which needs to be much more stable than Alchemist to stand a chance against Nvidia or AMD in discrete markets, especially above the entry level, although one game certainly isn't much to go on. Alchemists were also very strong in certain games.

Intel has proposed further improvements to Xe2 to improve performance. Lunar Lake's GPU is 1.5 times faster than Meteor Lake's, with more cores and a higher power budget, and Battlemage should at least offer the same improvements, but I'm quietly hoping for more.

If xe2 has increased utilization and efficiency, you should see even greater improvements on larger GPUs than Lunar Lake.