Includes ray tracing and improved machine learning performance graphics preview for Intel Arc B580 and B570 “Battlemage” discrete GPUs.
For the past decade, Ubuntu has been one of the first distributions to enable the latest Intel architectures. Building upon this strong collaboration, Intel and Canonical are excited to announce the availability of an Ubuntu graphics preview for Intel Arc B580 and B570 “Battlemage” discrete GPUs. This builds upon existing support for Intel Core Ultra Xe2 integrated GPUs in Ubuntu 24.10. The preview can be enabled today, which provides developers and enthusiasts access to a number of features and benefits:
- Performance optimizations, updates, and bugfixes
- Introduction of the new CCS optimization in compute-runtime
- Enable debugging support for Intel Xe GPUs
- Full Battlemage support with hardware encode for AVC, JPEG, HEVC, and AV1
- 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.
Intel and Canonical collaborate closely to ensure timely access to new features on advanced hardware. Intel believes in open source, contributing their code to upstream projects, and has already achieved full upstream support of Lunar Lake and Battlemage in the Linux kernel and other projects. This upstreaming process then relies on project(s) to release a version, and then wait for that to be integrated in a Linux distribution. This takes time. There is a lag between when features are enabled by the community, and when a user is able to take advantage of them without having to build their own libraries. While that’s a viable option for some, it’s important to provide an easier option for others that don’t have the skills or time - but still want to take advantage of cutting edge features.
Canonical puts an emphasis on ensuring that our users, and the ecosystem that serves them, have access to the most advanced hardware functionality in Ubuntu. This is evident by the recent announcement that when Ubuntu is released, it will always contain the most up to date kernel. This is also why we are releasing this graphics preview as a repository that can easily be added to an existing Ubuntu installation.
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. Over time, the team is working with the community to fully enable this graphics support in future Ubuntu releases.
Visit the README for the intel-graphics-preview to learn more and find instructions for how to install it.