Arc Battlemage in December
No new GPUs from Nvidia are expected to hit the market this year with the new products will be revealed in January (at CES 2025). But one possibly important premiere in the world of gaming GPUs is still slated to happen this year – Intel’s new Arc desktop GPUs, the Battlemage architecture, will be released. It looks surprisingly good in the mobile Lunar Lake processors, so Arc “Battlemage” desktop graphics cards might finally be worth it.
Due to the fact that that the first-generation Arc graphics cards didn’t sell too well, and Intel now needs to save money, there speculations or rumors about the cancellation of discrete Arc graphics cards were common. But Battlemage is indeed about to be released, so for now this effort to disrupt the “duopoly” in the gaming GPU market (though in practice it’s more of an Nvidia monopoly with AMD fighting uphill battle to get some leftovers) is still very much alive.
The date when these graphics cards will appear has now been revealed by a Chinese leaker with the nickname Golden Pig Upgrade on the social network Bilibili. He didn’t say much, unfortunately, but in a comment he stated he was “looking forward to Battlemage (desktop version only) performing brilliantly next month!“. The comment was written on November 7, so the next month mentioned must be December.
In that case the new graphics cards won’t come out until the very last month of the year and will probably only be able to enjoy a few weeks (or even just days) of the pre-Christmas shopping season, unfortunately for Intel. This looks similar to last year’s Meteor Lake launch, so maybe this is a bit of a strained attempt to meet deadlines before the end of the year, mainly for form. But it’s at least something – otherwise there would be no GPU news for the whole rest of this year.
No standalone Battlemage in laptops?
The comment specifically mentions that it will only be the desktop version of the Battlemage GPU that will be coming out at this date and there will be no laptop models (unless it’s the machine translation from chinese lying to us). This seems to fit with earlier information from the youtuber Moore’s Law is Dead, according to whom Intel is not planning laptop versions of these GPUs and Battlemage will be purely desktop launch in scope, unlike the Alchemist generation.
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This may be due to the lack of interest from laptop manufacturers, it’s possibly Intel tried but has failed to get design wins for Battlemage in any of the upcoming laptops. Even AMD, more established in the laptop gaming segment, has had big problems with this recently (it’s probably because of this, that the RDNA 3-based Radeon RX 7800M didn’t ever hit the market and only appeared after a huge delay when OneXGPU basically resurrected the product for use in their external graphics card). It’s entirely possible that Nvidia is exerting some behind-the-scenes pressure to squeeze the competition out of gaming laptops.
Golden Pig Upgrade did not disclose exactly what sorts of Battlemage graphics cards will be released. So far, samples of a GPU that has 20 Xe Cores with 2560 shaders with a 192-bit memory bus (so this card would probably carry 12GB of memory) have been leaked to the internet. Cheaper stripped-down versions of the same GPU will apparently exist with a 1792 shader configuration (14 Xe Cores). Intel was also planning a GPU with 32 Xe Cores (4096 shaders) and 256-bit memory for more powerful graphics cards, but it’s not clear if these models will come out in December as well. The Battlemage architecture seems to be able to reach high clock speeds, with samples leaked to the Geekbench test database reportedly seen clocking up to 2.85 GHz.
Read more: Intel catching up with Radeons? Battlemage GPUs will clock high
So there’s a chance that these cards could be actually decent and offer an attractive alternative to GeForce and Radeon cards (though of course it will also depend on drivers and optimizations in games). However, new gaming GPUs from AMD and Nvidia are coming out shortly after starting from January, so Intel won’t have it easy.
Last chance?
And it’s a question whether these Battlemage graphics cards won’t be the last ones to come out. While the reports of Battlemage’s death have turned out to be greatly exaggerated, the next generation, Celestial, is also increasingly considered to be cancelled when it comes to discrete graphics cards (and this time, completely with no mobile or desktop SKUs either), and in this case the rumors may not end up being untrue.
Nevertheless, Intel will continue to develop their own GPU architectures because it simply needs them, so such cancellation would mean the lineage of Arc GPUs will end for good (and support for the cards you buy now will vanish with that). Rather, there could be a situation where Arc “Celestial” will exist, but will move onto being strictly integrated GPUs present in Intel CPUs. But from a gaming perspective it will be the same architecture, so software support could be shared with the current discrete Arc cards and continuity could hopefully remain.
Source: VideoCardz
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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- Arc Battlemage in December
