Core Ultra 400 “Nova Lake” appears in Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers
This month Intel officially announced its Xe3 and Xe3p GPU architectures, the former coming to 2026 Panther Lake CPUs and the latter not yet officially tied to any consumer product. Intel did confirm that Xe3p will be used in the data-center Crescent Island GPU series and indirectly mentioned that it will also be “gaming capable,” without confirming whether it is intended for Celestial, the next-generation discrete gaming GPU series.
Around the same time these updates arrived, Intel began work on Nova Lake, its 2026 desktop and mobile platform for consumers. This product will cover more segments than Panther Lake, which is primarily, as far as we know, for mobile systems only. Nova Lake will also be coming to desktops.
The company has submitted the first patches to various Linux repositories, which do not confirm specifications yet, but they do confirm two things: there are at least five variants of Nova Lake, and some of them may not support ray tracing.
The PCI ID (GPU) list mentions five variants:
- Nova Lake-S (desktops)
- Nova Lake-U (low-power mobile)
- Nova Lake-UL (ultra-low-power mobile)
- Nova Lake-H (gaming laptops)
- Nova Lake-HX (enthusiast gaming laptops)
So basically a similar lineup to Arrow Lake.
Source: Freedesktop
Phoronix looked into the changes and noted that not all chips will support ray tracing . The S, HX, and UL variants will not support this feature, while U and H may include support.
Source: Freedesktop
Obviously this does not confirm anything fully, and even the SKU mapping may change, but it would not be a surprise given that Intel often disables parts of GPU blocks for segmentation (such as AMX acceleration support). Ray tracing, however, seems like a basic feature to support in 2026/2027 when these CPUs are expected to launch.
Source: Freedesktop via Phoronix