Intel has been busy at Computex this year and hasn’t shied away from demoing their new Lunar Lake chips. These processors benefit from Intel’s latest Xe2 graphics architecture to power the integrated graphics. Even without a discrete graphics card, it looks like it puts up a fight, especially with some help from their XeSS upscaling tech.

F1 24 was released at the very end of May and is Codemaster’s latest edition of the Formula 1 racing game series. When putting together our guide to the best graphics settings for F1 24, we noticed that the game provides plenty of options to fine-tuning your visuals. It looks like Intel has taken full advantage of that, taking advantage of XeSS to even show off this new architecture’s ray tracing performance.

F1 24 demoed on Lunar Lake Xe2 GPU

We now have a good idea of what Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics have to offer, Lunar Lake being Intel’s latest mobile chips. Xe2 is the GPU architecture that will be shared by the upcoming Battlemage graphics cards, expected to launch later in the year. A preview from Intel at Computex recently showed off a Lunar Lake chip with Xe2 graphics reaching a consistent 60 FPS at 1080p. Hassan Mujtaba on X captured some footage of this in action, showing the game at high settings with ray tracing shadows enabled in XeSS performance mode.

The smooth performance is a notable milestone for the iGPU-based graphics on Lunar Lake, especially since it can pull off some ray tracing too. While this is running at 1080p, the XeSS performance mode will be upscaling it from around 480p (if based on the latest XeSS 1.3 version that released back in April).

What does this mean for upcoming Battlemage?

We think that this little preview of the Xe2 architecture is just the start for Intel fans, as discrete graphics card solutions will of course bring some more power to the table compared to Lunar Lake mobile chips. We’ll have to wait for Intel Arc Battlemage to see what Xe2 can do when applied to a dedicated GPU, but it looks incredibly promising. Great news considering Intel is rock bottom of recent GPU market share reports.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.