While there is nice out-of-the-box support for the new Intel Arc " [1]Battlemage " graphics cards on the new Ubuntu 25.04 release, if you prefer running the Ubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release there isn't complete support until the next hardware enablement "HWE" update. But Intel in cooperation with Canonical has now published a new graphics driver preview stack for enabling better Intel Arc B-Series support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS users.

The Intel Graphics Preview Release v1.1.0 stack was released today for providing newer Intel graphics driver support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The primary focus is on enhancing the support for the Xe2 Battlemage and Lunar Lake platforms but these software updates can also benefit other Intel graphics hardware too. This is also just a "preview" driver stack with Intel rcommending it not be used in production environments and "For guaranteed support, please use Ubuntu 25.04 or later."

Intel Graphics Preview Release v1.1.0 delivers:

- Performance optimizations, updates, and bugfixes

- Introduction of the new CCS optimization in compute-runtime

- Enable debugging support for Intel Xe GPUs

- Full Battlemage enablement

- 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.

For those rolling your own software builds of the Linux kernel and Mesa and other components, this graphics preview release doesn't provide anything new. This preview stack simply is capturing the newer upstream code and building for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS compared to what it otherwise ships out-of-the-box.

The Ubuntu 24.04 package builds with Intel Graphics Preview Release v1.1.0 are based on the Linux 6.11 kernel, the Intel Compute Runtime 25.13.33276.22, the Intel Media Driver 25.2.2, and other newer Intel software bits.

For those wondering about the current Intel Linux driver support upstream for Battlemage can see this month's [2]Intel Arc Graphics B570 & B580 Gaming Performance On Linux For Mid 2025 .

Those interested in these Intel graphics driver software updates for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (and Ubuntu 24.10) users can find out all the details via [3]GitHub .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Battlemage

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-battlemage-linux-may2025

[3] https://github.com/canonical/intel-graphics-preview/releases/tag/v1.1.0