Intel Meteor Lake CPUs' Integrated Graphics are 33 Percent Faster Than Prior Gen, Linux Benchmarks Show

Intel Meteor Lake
(Image credit: Intel)

Among the improvements seen with Intel's Meteor Lake launch has been a great jump in power and efficiency in their integrated graphics. The  Arc graphics inside the latest Intel CPU can perform better than the competing Radeon 780M iGPU from AMD, and this may be the first time Intel is beating AMD in integrated graphics. 

So, how much of an improvement is Intel's Meteor Lake integrated graphics compared to past generations? Phoronix sought out the answer to this question and published it in the form of a set of iGPU benchmarks across 5 Intel laptop CPUs, each from a different generation. All testing was conducted in Linux, like their past iGPU testing and on-launch Meteor Lake Linux CPU testing.

The GPU testing being discussed here isn't quite as thorough as that prior 370 CPU benchmark run, but still varied enough to paint a clear picture of Intel iGPU evolution from late 2018 to late 2023.

Below, we'll be including two key graphics from Phoronix's testing: one for power consumption from each CPU during testing, and another providing the geomean average of all test results combined for each CPU. Afterward, we'll discuss some of the specific games and synthetic benchmarks used, with full results available at the original source if they're needed.

First, the main benchmarking results show some truly impressive generational gains from Intel. 

This is actually Intel's biggest iGPU jump in quite some time, and the combined test results of games and staple 3D benchmarks help paint a clear picture of that difference. Overall, the Core Ultra 7 155H's Arc graphics are 33% faster than the Core i7 1280P's on average. Compared to the old Core i7 8565U, it's more than quintupled.

Titles used in these benchmarks include Enemy Territory: Legacy, Tesseract, Unvanquished, and Warsow. Meanwhile, synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark Wild Life Extreme and GravityMark were used. All three of Unigine's Heaven, Valley, and Superposition benchmarks are also included in the results above.

Power consumption monitoring during testing also showed that even at full utilization, Intel's latest generation operates at about half the average power of last-gen. 

These are impressive gains in power efficiency, and may even start making room for, say . . . Intel iGPUs in entry-level handhelds, akin to the AMD APUs already common in that space? This kind of power efficiency at a 24-Watt average bodes well for low-power devices in general, in any case. For more details, see Phoronix's complete list of test results.

Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.

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  • MBOO7
    Lets hear it for TSMC, supplying those juicy gpu tiles ;)
    Reply
  • kjfatl
    I don't do gaming. For the last PC I bought I used it for a few months before buying a decent graphics card.
    I didn't get a lot for the $600 I spent on the card. For most PC users, better IGP gets rid of the need of buying a video card. I am running 2 4K monitors.
    For me, power consumption is a big concern. It's not so much the cost of the power, but I don't want my office heating up in the summer with the PC acting as a heater.

    TSMC is a great asset for all of us. It will be interesting to see what happens when Intel begins offering real competition to TSMC in the next 2 to 3 years. The results are likely to make all of us happier.
    Reply
  • Amdlova
    kjfatl said:
    I don't do gaming. For the last PC I bought I used it for a few months before buying a decent graphics card.
    I didn't get a lot for the $600 I spent on the card. For most PC users, better IGP gets rid of the need of buying a video card. I am running 2 4K monitors.
    For me, power consumption is a big concern. It's not so much the cost of the power, but I don't want my office heating up in the summer with the PC acting as a heater.

    TSMC is a great asset for all of us. It will be interesting to see what happens when Intel begins offering real competition to TSMC in the next 2 to 3 years. The results are likely to make all of us happier.
    Get a used 13500t on ebay :) will do all you need and it's cheap
    Reply
  • kjfatl
    Already have i7-12700k @ 3.6GHZ and Radeon RX 6800XT. I'm good with this PC for at least 5 years. I have thought of getting a faster processor to drop in to the Z690 motherboard, but don't see the need.

    This was a great upgrade for the Skylake based PC in replaced.

    Next purchase will be some sort of laptop.
    Reply