Intel's new graphics cards are just around the corner

Under the codename "Battlemage", Intel will soon be releasing its second dedicated Arc graphics card generation. This is indicated by various leaks in recent weeks. Intel probably wants to get ahead of its competitors AMD and Nvidia, who will be presenting their new line-up at CES in January.

Driver entries and leaks hint at December release

At the end of October, it was reported that Battlemage had appeared in drivers. At the beginning of November, Chinese hardware leaker Golden Pig Upgrade then posted that he was looking forward to the Battlemage GPUs in December. Shortly afterwards, data miner Tomasz Gawroński named the same release month.

The line-up will be led by the Intel Arc B580. The slightly weaker B570 is also due to arrive in December. Both are mid-range models. Competitor AMD also wants to focus on this segment with the upcoming RDNA-4 generation. The big price-performance battle will therefore take place there, as Nvidia will also serve the mid-range. There are only a few rumours about performance. Although the leap in raw performance is small, work is said to have been done on efficiency. AMD's cards are expected to offer the maximum performance of the current flagship, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

Amazon had already listed B580 cards

Amazon has revealed that the launch is imminent. Models from Intel board partner ASRock have already been spotted in the shop. The Steel Legend and Challenger models were on display.

However, the cards were quickly removed again, meaning that only a few specifications are known. For example, Intel continues to rely on the standard PCIe 8-pin cables. The Steel Legend model uses two, which indicates a maximum of 375 watts. The Challenger, on the other hand, makes do with one connector, which in turn indicates 225 watts.

The memory is said to utilise 12 gigabytes (GB) of GDDR6, which would be four GB more than its predecessor, the A580. The memory bandwidth is said to be 456 GB/s, which is less than its predecessor. PCIe 5.0x8 is to be used for the interface, so you will need a corresponding mainboard.

What's next for Intel's dedicated graphics cards?

Even after Battlemage, Intel is not yet finished with dedicated graphics cards. According to leaker SquashBionic further generations will be added. However, it is still unclear when and what these will look like. The only thing that is clear so far is that Intel wants to use the architecture called "Celestial" for mobile chips.