Ubuntu 24.04 LTS gets improved Intel GPU support

Canonical recently announced Ubuntu 24.04 LTS has been upgraded to improve support for modern Intel GPUs. This version of Ubuntu is supported until 31st May, 2029.

Writing in a post on the official Ubuntu Discourse forum from Canonical developer Shane McKee, this is still only a Preview and so it does "not come with the same guarantees as the Ubuntu archives, is intended for testing and validation purposes only, and is not recommended for use in production environments".

A collaboration between Intel and Canonical to provide early preview of kernel and userspace support for new Intel GPUs with this introducing "comprehensive functionality enablement within userspace packages essential for AI, compute, and media stacks".

When testing it out you can find these improvements:

• Performance optimizations, updates, and bugfixes.
• Introduction of the new CCS optimization in compute-runtime.
• Enable debugging support for discrete Intel Xe GPUs.
• 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.