Ubuntu 24.04 LTS support has been added to the Intel Graphics Preview, an opt-in repository maintained by Intel and Canonical to provide cutting-edge support for newer Intel GPUs
Users running the latest Ubuntu 25.04 release get full support for Intel Core Ultra integrated GPUs (‘Lunar Lake’) and Intel Arc B580 or B570 (‘Battlemage’) discrete GPUs out of the box.
But Ubuntu 24.04 LTS only provides basic support for the same GPUs, much of it back-ported as part of the Ubuntu 24.04.2 release earlier this year. Regular readers will remember the preview: it was made available for Ubuntu 24.10 last year.
Keen to ensure that its LTS users don’t miss out, Canonical and Intel have made the Intel Graphics Preview stack available for testing on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
Those opting to join the Intel Graphics Preview on Ubuntu 24.04 will, according to Canonical, unlock “comprehensive functionality enablement within userspace packages essential for AI, compute, and media stacks.”
Which is neat.
Applications that support Intel Embree, like the latest versions of Blender, benefit from much improved GPU + CPU ray tracing rendering with the new stack, with hardware accelerated ray tracing is said to see rendering boosts of between 2-4x.
Alongside that, the preview includes scores of performance improvements, bug-fixes, and other smaller tweaks, debugging support on Intel Xe dGPUs, and a new runtime compute feature.
Preview ≠ Officially Supported
The preview is part of a “collaboration between Intel and Canonical to provide early preview of kernel and userspace support for new Intel GPUs. Some components are directly from Ubuntu archives and some are from a PPA.”
“This repository is a preview that does not come with the same guarantees as the Ubuntu archives. It is intended for testing and validation purposes only and is not recommended for use in production environments,” cautions the project Github.
If maximum stability and guaranteed support are paramount, stick with the official Ubuntu repositories for now. Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS, due later this year, back-ports an updated hardware stack from Ubuntu 25.04 where these GPUs have full support.
Otherwise, if you’re on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, have an Intel GPU listed, and would love to take full advantage of what it can do, head to the Intel Graphics Preview GitHub for more details on how to enable it.