Intel has made 'a tremendous amount of fixes for compatibility' in its Battlemage GPU architecture to ensure games run as they should

Intel's next graphics architecture, Xe2, will be more widely compatible with games and less clunky, says Intel Fellow Tom Petersen. The improvements announced so far for Xe2 include many specifically designed to correct issues widely reported with current Arc discrete graphics cards. But they're also designed to and put it in line with the more popular architecture of the day. 

The new Xe2 architecture powering Intel's latest Lunar Lake processors is the same as what's set to arrive inside its Battlemage graphics cards. We're still none the wiser as to when Battlemage will be released, though Lunar Lake is coming later this year, in Q3. 

Over at a Lunar Lake event, Petersen has spoken about what we can expect from the forthcoming graphics architecture: «When you think back to Alchemist, and as new games launch, we have a lot of issues and we require lots of bug fixes and driver fixes. And DX9 specifically needs a lot of work.

»We've made a tremendous amount of fixes for compatibility all across the architecture. So by its nature, we are more, let's call it, compliant with the dominant expectation."

These changes take various forms, though I'm told it's not only improvements to the software stack, but changes to the silicon itself to make it gel more easily with modern games. 

There's hardware support for commonly used commands, such as execute indirect, which causes headaches and slows performance on Alchemist. Another command, Fast Clear, is now supported in the Xe2 hardware, rather than having to be emulated in software as it was on Alchemist.

There's also been a shift from SIMD8 to SIMD16 for the Vector Engine—the core block of Intel's GPU—which should help improve efficiency. Alongside further improvements for bandwidth and, importantly, utilisation.

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«Think about Xe2 as the next generation of GPU architecture designed to be more compatible with games and higher