Advanced Intel® Battlemage GPU features now available for Ubuntu 24.04

Last month, Canonical announced Ubuntu 25.04 Plucky Puffin, which has a number of updates for Intel Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics features. Much of that work was first available to Ubuntu users back in December, when we announced our graphics preview for Ubuntu 24.10. We’ve now updated the preview to include Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, as well. Although initial kernel and Mesa support were implemented in 24.04.2, providing basic functionality for booting and GUI usage, the preview for 24.04 introduces comprehensive functionality enablement within userspace packages essential for AI, compute, and media stacks.

In addition to full Battlemage and Lunar Lake enablement, users can expect the following improvements:

  • Performance optimizations, updates, and bugfixes
  • Introduction of the new CCS optimization in compute-runtime
  • Enable debugging support for discrete Intel Xe GPUs
  • oneAPI Level Zero Ray Tracing improves AI/ML workload speeds via Embree on SYCL
  • Improved GPU + CPU ray tracing rendering performance in applications with Intel Embree support, such as Blender (v4.2+). Ray tracing hardware acceleration on the GPU gives 2x to 4x speedup for the ray tracing component of rendering and 20% to 30% improvement on the entire frame rendering.

Visit the README for the intel-graphics-preview to learn more and find instructions for how to install it.

Disclaimer: Given that this is a preview, the repository does not come with the same guarantees as the Ubuntu archives, is intended for testing and validation purposes only, and is not recommended for use in production environments. If you prefer to work with supported repositories, you can use Ubuntu 25.04 or contact Canonical for other options.

4 Likes