Canonical and Intel have announced they’re making it easier for Ubuntu users to get cutting-edge drivers for Intel’s newest discrete GPUs.

The effort brings “ray tracing and improved machine learning performance” for Intel Arc B580 and B570 “Battlemage” discrete GPUs to users on Ubuntu 24.10, building on that releases’ preexisting support for Intel Core Ultra Xe2 iGPUs.

“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 [24.10]”, they say.

Users with compatible hardware can opt-in to the preview from today to enjoy:

  • Performance optimisations, updates, and bug fixes
  • New CCS optimisation in compute-runtime
  • Debugging support for Intel Xe GPUs
  • Full Battlemage support with hardware encode for AVC, JPEG, HEVC, and AV1
  • oneAPI Level Zero Ray Tracing

GPU and CPU ray tracing rendering performance in apps which support Intel Embree, like Blender, is markedly improved, offering up to 4x speedups during rendering with ray tracing, and up to 30 percent improvement on entire frame rendering.

So why is this is a preview, and why is it only on Ubuntu 24.10?

Intel is said to have “already achieved full upstream support of Lunar Lake and Battlemage in the Linux kernel and other projects”, but that there is often a gap between support landing upstream, and downstream distros adopting it:

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.

Chris Schnabel, Canonical

Thus, Canonical and Intel is making this graphics preview available for users who want it sooner.

Available via a GitHub repository with a simple setup script which, when run, adds a PPA. The effort lacks any of the normal quality assurances Ubuntu software comes with so shouldn’t (in theory) be used on a production system.

The Intel Graphics Preview for Ubuntu 24.10 only supports the following GPUs:

  • Intel Core Ultra Mobile Processors (Series 2, Lunar Lake)
  • Intel Arc B-Series graphics cards (Battlemage)

Head over to the Intel Graphics Preview repo on GitHub to find out more on how to install it (spoiler: download the ZIP, extract, run the script inside which adds this PPA and then installs a myriad of packages from it).