INTEL METEOR LAKE & ARC GRAPHICS
For desktop integrated graphics, there’s really no competition between AMD and Intel. Intel’s graphics solutions in 12th through 14th Gen
Core processors use the same Xe-LP architecture as the 11th Gen Tiger Lake laptop processors that launched in 2020, except where the mobile chips included Xe Graphics with up to 96 graphics Execution Units (768 shader ALUs), the desktop processors top out at just 32 EUs
(256 shaders).
That makes for a huge gap in potential performance. Where the older mobile
GPUs could deliver up to 2.1 teraflops of compute, even the fastest desktop iGPUs from Intel still fail to break the 1 teraflop barrier: the Core i9-14900K with UHD Graphics 770 offers a theoretical 845 gigaflops of graphics compute. They’re sufficient for basic office and desktop use, with decent video decoding and encoding capabilities, but for gaming and graphics they’re only fit for very lightweight tasks— stuff from around a decade ago should be okay.
Intel does much better with laptop graphics. The Arc Graphics in the latest Core Ultra processors peaks at a theoretical 4.8 teraflops. That should prove more than capable of competing with previous generation budget GPUs, and on paper at least it’s roughly equal to Nvidia’s old GTX 1650
Super. However, it has to share system memory bandwidth and power with the CPU, and drivers appear to be holding Arc Graphics back—a bit like the first few months of Arc dedicated GPUs has been our experience.
Will Intel ‘go big’ on desktop integrated graphics? We suspect not, because the easiest way to boost graphics performance in that case is to add a dedicated graphics card. Laptops benefit from the power savings with integrated graphics, which for desktops Intel already offers dedicated Arc solutions.