I hope this won't affect their graphics roadmap or execution thereof.
Meteor Lake looks to be
finally showing some payoff on their graphics investments, having resoundingly bested AMD's Radeon 780M on both Linux and Windows!
I don't see "resoundingly bested" on Phoronix. There is a slight ~5% performance lead on synthetic graphics benchmarks across the board and the power lead might just about equal things when a real game is running on the CPU side of the SoC.
Both of these chips won't excite desktop gamers and may just about as good as a Steam deck or similar
at their resolutions, not with the 3k many of these ultrabooks have today. If you were to buy these notebooks for gaming, you're likely to be disappointed, if you're just enjoying Google Maps in 3D, there is little chance you'll never notice the difference.
I have a Serpent Canyon NUC12 that sells near €700 again these days with VAT and includes both the internal Xe 96EU iGPU launched with Tiger Lake, as well as the 512 EU A770 mobile with 16GB GDDR6 VRAM @ 256-bit at 2GHz, roughly 4x the graphics power of these units while the i7-12700H should be very similar in terms of CPU power.
In other words: it shows the range of what is possible with Intel iGPU and dGPU in a luggable form factor.
For the A770m that is pretty good performance at everything 1080p (except Unreal 5). It's still ok for many things at 1440p, sometimes faster than 60Hz, too. That system would be by far a better bang for the gaming buck, unless you need a laptop.
But on my favorite ARC Survival game the switch from Evolved (early Unreal 4) to Ascend (Unreal 5), kicked the A770 out of the competition, where only DLSS cards can survive today. XeSS hasn't doubled performance in any game I've tried, while DLSS 3 often does better than that.
GUI type Linux graphics driver support on Intel has been rather better in my opinion than Charlie Demerjian's, but evidently that won't be the case for some time with these newest chips.
What turns out to be really tricky is passing through the dGPU to a VM e.g. for ML compute workloads while keeping the iGPU on the host, because with Intel they both use the same driver.
I've never really tried gaming on Linux for more than a few minutes: either performance or quality (or both) were typically too far behind Windows to make it worthwhile: but it's one of the things on my Christmas vacation to-do list to retry (mostly with an RTX 4090).
On Linux notebooks I'd be most worried about power management and there neither Intel nor AMD have been nearly as good on Linux as on Windows. Even light desktop work on Linux could empty batteries rather quickly.
In terms of Windows endurance my Zen 3 5800U based Lenovo ultrabook lasts a lot longer than my Alder Lake based ASUS Zenbook, while they provide roughly similar performance on CPU and GPU workloads and I don't see that change significantly with this newer generation.
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