Friday, November 8th 2024
Intel to Tease Arc "Battlemage" Discrete GPU in December?
Intel is expected to debut its next-generation Arc "Battlemage" discrete GPU in December 2024, or ahead of the 2025 CES, HotHardware reports, citing Golden Pig Upgrade, a reliable source with GPU leaks. The source says that they expect "wonderful performance" for the GPU. Intel has a lot invested in its PC graphics division, across not just its two-year-old Arc "Alchemist" discrete GPUs, but also the integrated graphics solutions it's been launching with its Core Ultra processor generations. It debuted the DirectX 12 Ultimate-capable Xe-LPG graphics architecture with Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" and Arc Graphics branding, which it carried forward to the Core Ultra Series 200 "Arrow Lake" on the desktop platform. Meanwhile, "Battlemage" got debuted as the iGPU of the Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake" mobile processor, which posted gaming performance beating that of the Ryzen 8000 "Hawk Point" processor, but falling short of the Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point."
Intel is expected to tap into a fairly new foundry node for the Arc "Battlemage" discrete GPU series. Its chips could strike a performance/Watt and performance/price inflection point in the performance segment, that drives the most volumes for NVIDIA and AMD. It is this exact segment that AMD has withdrawn from the enthusiast segment to focus on, with its next-generation Radeon RDNA 4 generation. With "Alchemist," Intel already laid a strong foundation for hardware-accelerated ray tracing and AI, and the company is only expected to advance on these fronts further. Could "Battlemage" and "Granite Rapids" go down as the most exciting products from Intel in 2024? We should find out next month.
Source:
HotHardware
Intel is expected to tap into a fairly new foundry node for the Arc "Battlemage" discrete GPU series. Its chips could strike a performance/Watt and performance/price inflection point in the performance segment, that drives the most volumes for NVIDIA and AMD. It is this exact segment that AMD has withdrawn from the enthusiast segment to focus on, with its next-generation Radeon RDNA 4 generation. With "Alchemist," Intel already laid a strong foundation for hardware-accelerated ray tracing and AI, and the company is only expected to advance on these fronts further. Could "Battlemage" and "Granite Rapids" go down as the most exciting products from Intel in 2024? We should find out next month.
34 Comments on Intel to Tease Arc "Battlemage" Discrete GPU in December?
Honestly with Intel doing their share of AMD-like failures (I think we'll conclude their recent affairs are far worse than Bulldozer ever was, after all those didn't degrade out of the box...) my faith in them ever getting some semblance of perf parity with Nvidia or AMD on GPUs is Mortal Kombat Sub-Zero right now. Fatality... comes to mind.
How about everyone withholds their narrow judgements until AFTER the products are released and the benchmarks are in, eh? I mean, what, that's only logical.
Between RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 ti with ray tracing enabled.
More here(russian!)
I really think it all comes down to price no matter where the performance is. If people think the only way they can succeed is buy competing with 4090/5090, they're wrong. There's a reason the 3060 is still top of the Steam charts. The low-end has been stagnating and forgotten and if they can offer a good performance increase at the entry level pricing, it'll be an easy winner. XeSS looks better than FSR and they've had less time to work on it with hardware...they're RT is better than AMD too, so if Nvidia keeps handicapping their low end for maximum profit and AMD doesn't really compete from a performance perspective, Battlemage can wipe the floor with both of them on the highest-volume segment of the market.
My problem here with everything I just said: There are a lot of "if" statements lol. I haven't seen any performance leaks and I have no idea where they're going to price it. So we'll just have to wait and find out I guess.
Supposedly Xe2 fixed the broken hardware of the past, so it's entirely on how much management lets the driver team actually work. Regardless of the result, I already got burned with an EoL Xe1 after 2 years of support, so don't count me in, Intel.
They trade blows and it comes and goes. Though over a long time intel has consistently put up more wins and superior products. The GPU space is very different. Going back not to far but the only real win AMD has produced was back when they were ATi with the 9700pro and the 9800pro. Even then it was less that those products were great than the nvidia FX 5800 was a disaster. It was the first dual slot card, extremely loud, sucked too much power, and performed worse. The FX series got better but it wasn't till the 6800 series came out that nvidia pulled ahead and since then they haven't looked back and ran away with entire GPU market. Fermi was the only screw up but even then it wasn't a big enough one to really hurt.
AMD is stuck in an odd place where they only come out ahead when their competition shits the bed. And then they are ahead right up until their competitors get their act together and the situation changes.
The thing with entry level is that you have a huge variety of shoppers, including from system vendors ala ibuypower, cyperpower, etc. that either don't know what they're shopping for or can't afford to be picky either way. If they even look at reviews (which it's hard to get some people to read reviews anyway), and the cards review well, especially on performance/price, then yes I think people will buy them. I think if you look at pre-built buyers out there (and a good chunk of DIYers) in the budget-build and even some mid-range...they're really just trying to get the best thing they can get for the price. They don't really care about Nvidia/AMD/Intel and honestly they shouldn't as brand loyalty can lead to bad places lol. So (here we go with the if statements again)...IF Intel can launch Battlemage at a good perf/price than I believe they will sell well. Nvidia owns the top-end and for years AMD could take most of the mid-range or low end. They could both say "well it's us or nobody" and that's their prerogative, but that's where a third vendor can really shake things up....assuming again that the if-statements are met.
The result: CIV V is stuck on the integrated GPU and the brave browser is on the Nvidia chip. Only solution has been to downgrade drivers.
If intel manages to launch battlemage with no driver regressions from Alchemist, and has substantial improvements in raw power, they may have a winner. But based on meteor lake, I wouldnt be holding my breath. Meteor lake's XE2 drivers were utterly broken and even now are less stable then alchemist.