While upcoming GPUs like the rumored Nvidia 50-series will supposedly break the bank and power thresholds in equal measure, we may hopefully find our budget option from Intel and its long-awaited Battlemage GPUs. The beleaguered chipmaker confirmed it has some “big graphics news” dropping Tuesday.
Intel released a teaser video over the Thanksgiving holiday break showing what’s obviously a graphics card of some kind. Since then, the rumor mill has hammered on about the chipmaker’s upcoming B570 and B580 GPUs. Team Blue has tried pushing its discrete GPUs for a few years, and its Alchemist lineup, like the A580, is already entrenched for budget-end buyers. Leaks for the Battlemage indicate the higher-end GPU will be Intel’s hardest-hitting graphics processor to date.
We’ve got some big graphics news 👀… pic.twitter.com/sylnOZogMq
— Intel Gaming (@IntelGaming) November 30, 2024
There have been leaks on Amazon, and at least one YouTuber has offered us a look at what Intel’s B580 graphics card could look like. This version from OEM ASRock, with its three fans, is supposedly overclocked to 2.8 GHz with 12 GB of GDDR6 VRAM. According to these images leaked online, the new card should have a PCIe 4.0 interface and use dual 8-pin power connectors. It certainly won’t be as power-hungry as the most high-end GPUs from Nvidia or AMD.
The best Intel could do is not try to compete with the upcoming Nvidia 50-series or the Radeon RX 8000 series from AMD. Specs leaks reported by Videocardz last month show the B570 could sport 18 Xe2-Cores, while the B580 could do 20 Xe2-Cores. The lower-end card could also have 10 GB of GDDR6 RAM. If you believe the leaked specs, both ASRock cards will support three DisplayPort 2.1 slots and an HDMI 2.1 port.
This indicates that these cards will be cheaper than the top-of-the-line GPUs you’ll find elsewhere, but Intel hasn’t dropped any hint about pricing. Plenty of unconfirmed rumors on the Chinese social media app Weibo mention synthetic benchmarks, but perhaps the best we could claim is that Intel’s GPU could match the performance of the Nvidia Geforce RTX 4060 Ti. That Ada Lovelace card starts at $300, but we don’t know what any RTX 5060 GPU may cost.
Generations be damned. More affordable graphics processors need to be on the market. Intel’s mobile and desktop offerings will support the company’s XeSS upscaling tech, the most recent super sampling technology compared to AMD’s FSR and Nvidia’s DLSS. If Intel can get more games to support it, XeSS could be an extra option to expand performance in some titles.
Intel’s latest Arrow Lake desktop processors also promise good gaming performance without needing a discrete GPU. Of course, an APU will never beat the strength of a full card. The latest Core Ultra 200S lineup for desktops isn’t supposed to be a 14th-gen desktop processor follow-up, especially regarding gaming performance.
On the mobile end, Intel has promoted the ARC graphics for chips like the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V, which should equal solid performance in some demanding games, though you won’t find a laptop with that SKU out in the wild. We’ve used RTX 4060s on several mobile platforms, and with the right configuration, it can run games fairly well. We’d be curious to see Intel design a version of Battlemage for laptops and desktops. Perhaps we could finally have an all-Intel gaming laptop, as weird as that sounds.
