I would be using these if I could even find an Intel Arc 770 GPU here in Canada that isnt overpriced. Local company has them on discount as while quantity lasts, and its never in stock so.....

sepheronxI would be using these if I could even find an Intel Arc 770 GPU here in Canada that isnt overpriced. Local company has them on discount as while quantity lasts, and its never in stock so.....

Maybe they'll get their stuff together when Battlemage comes out.

Lots of FW updates across the board with these.

DristunMaybe they'll get their stuff together when Battlemage comes out.

idk, I feel we are hearing worryingly little about it

ZoneDymoidk, I feel we are hearing worryingly little about it

Yeah, we should have seen or heard something by now.

sepheronxYeah, we should have seen or heard something by now.

Tom Petersen said "before CES2025 hopefully" or something along these lines and that was at the start of the year. Didn't sound promising back then but hey, they still have a couple of months. Would be interesting to know why they can't launch sooner though, as the thing is ready, has been for months, and looks pretty promising in laptops.

ZoneDymoidk, I feel we are hearing worryingly little about it

Or maybe they cooked up a real beast that can make even nGreedia beg for mercy? Who knows, if the Intel/AMD show has taught us anything, we shouldn't be surprised if something extraordinary happens and surprises us all.

ZoneDymoidk, I feel we are hearing worryingly little about it

There's not a lot of reason to release updated hardware until their software catches up, it's a huge outlay of money to spin those up. The A770 hardware as example should be a direct competitor to the 4070 and 7700 XT, but the drivers have it around 7600 / 4060 performance levels on average.

Of course, not as simple as that - depends on what title and the averages are weighted down heavily due to older titles.

But new hardware isn't going to change the software deficit, even if it's next-gen capable hardware. With Battlemage we'd likely get a card with 4080 / 7900 hardware capabilities being shoved into the 4070 / 7700 XT performance bracket due to those drivers, just as new 5070 / 8700 cards are released.

Even if they do release Battlemage, I would imagine it's going to be small numbers produced like Arc was. There's no reason to burn all that fab production capability on something that makes no profit until they have the drivers to match the hardware.

RandallFlaggThere's not a lot of reason to release updated hardware until their software catches up, it's a huge outlay of money to spin those up. The A770 hardware as example should be a direct competitor to the 4070 and 7700 XT, but the drivers have it around 7600 / 4060 performance levels on average.

It doesn't perform well because the hardware is subpar and needs high utilization/workload to perform, meaning high settings and resolutions. And on top of that it has missing instructions such as Execute Indirect which had to be emulated, and in heavy EI using engines such as Unreal 5 the performance was terrible. Also in BMG they move to SIMD16 versus SIMD8 which improves Day 0 compatibility and also improves efficiency.

There are likely many low-level details that make Alchemist underperform. It isn't even taking full advantage of the 512GB/s memory bandwidth. That's how sucky the hardware is.

RandallFlaggBut new hardware isn't going to change the software deficit, even if it's next-gen capable hardware. With Battlemage we'd likely get a card with 4080 / 7900 hardware capabilities being shoved into the 4070 / 7700 XT performance bracket due to those drivers, just as new 5070 / 8700 cards are released.

Hardware will improve the situation on Battlemage because it fixes certain architectural imbalances that are present in Alchemist. Software fixes were necessary on Alchemist to make up for the weaknesses and it put a lot of burden on them since often it has to be done on a game-by-game basis. If the architecture sucks, that's what you have to do. You can see on Lunarlake reviews that it already does quite a bit better compared to Time Spy.

Battlemage will require lot less effort both on compatibility and performance from a software point of view, because it has lot less glass-jaw scenarios. Even Battlemage will not completely address this. It'll take at least Celestial.

Two well known fallacies regarding Intel Alchemist:
-Software is crap and it's the whole reason it sucks: No, hardware is also crap, and makes driver team do more work, and can't perform well out of the box without hand tuning.
-DX11 sucks because it's emulated like DX9: No, DX11 has been from the beginning, Native. It performs bad because it needed optimizations. Also DX9 has been native since early last year.