While upcoming GPUs such as Nvidia’s rumored 50-series are supposedly going to break the banking and power thresholds in equal measure, we can hope to find our budget option from Intel and its long-awaited Battlemage GPUs. The beleaguered chipmaker confirmed that it has “big graphics news” on Tuesday.
Intel released a teaser video over the Thanksgiving holiday break showing what appears to be some sort of graphics card. Since then, rumors about the upcoming B570 and B580 GPUs from the chipmaker have not subsided. Team Blue has been trying to promote its discrete GPUs for several years now, and the Alchemist line, like the A580, has already proven itself among budget buyers. Leaked information about Battlemage indicates that the high-end GPU will be Intel’s most sophisticated GPU to date.
The leaks appeared on Amazon, and at least one YouTube user offered us a look at what the Intel B580 graphics card might look like. This three-fan version from OEM ASRock is allegedly overclocked to 2.8GHz with 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM. Judging by these leaked images, 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 powerful GPUs from Nvidia or AMD.
The best thing Intel can do is not try to compete with Nvidia’s upcoming 50 series or AMD’s Radeon RX 8000 series. A specs leak reported by Videocardz last month shows that the B570 could have 18 Xe2 cores and the B580 could have 20 Xe2 cores. The junior model may also have 10GB of GDDR6 RAM. According to 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-end GPUs you’ll find elsewhere, but Intel hasn’t made any hint of a price. Many unconfirmed rumors on the Chinese social network Weibo mention synthetic benchmarks, but perhaps the best we can say is that the Intel GPU can match the performance of the Nvidia Geforce RTX 4060 Ti. This Ada Lovelace card starts at $300, but we don’t know how much any RTX 5060 GPU might cost.
Generations be damned. More affordable GPUs are about to hit the market. Intel’s mobile and desktop solutions will support XeSS scaling technology, the latest super-sampling technology compared to AMD’s FSR and Nvidia’s DLSS. If Intel can attract more games to support it, XeSS could be an additional option to improve performance in some games.
Intel’s latest Arrow Lake desktop processors also promise good gaming performance without the need for a discrete GPU. Of course, an APU can never surpass the power of a full-fledged graphics card. The newest Core Ultra 200S line for desktops was not meant to be a successor to 14th generation processors, especially in terms of gaming performance.
On the mobile side, Intel is pushing ARC graphics for chips like the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V, which should provide consistent performance in some demanding games, although you won’t find a laptop with this SKU in the wild. We’ve used the RTX 4060 on several mobile platforms, and with the right configuration, it can run games quite well. We would be interested to see Intel develop a laptop and desktop version of Battlemage. Maybe we will finally get a fully gaming laptop from Intel, as strange as it may sound.
