From Nvidia, according to the current state of knowledge, no new graphics should reach the market this year, and their news will be revealed in January (at CES 2025). But one possibly important premiere in the world of gaming GPUs will happen already this year – the new Arc desktop graphics from Intel will be released, the generation labeled Battlemage. The latter looks surprisingly good on Lunar Lake mobile processors, so the Arc “Battlemage” desktop graphics might finally be worth it.
Since the first-generation Arc graphics did not sell well and Intel now needs to save money, there are often speculations and rumors about the cancellation of standalone Arc graphics. But Battlemage is really getting ready for release, so for now this effort to disrupt the “duopoly” in the gaming GPU market (in practice, it’s more of a Nvidia monopoly with some AMD sidestepping) is still alive.
The date when these graphics are to appear has now been revealed by a Chinese leaker with the nickname Golden Pig Upgrade on the Bilibili social network. Unfortunately, he didn’t say much, but he said in the comments that “looking forward to seeing how Battlemage (desktop cards) perform next month“. The comment was written on 7/11, so December must be the next month.
The new graphics will therefore not be released until the very last month of the year and will probably only have a few weeks (or days) of the pre-Christmas shopping season, unfortunately for Intel. It looks similar to Meteor Lake last year, so maybe it will be a bit of a strained effort to make the deadline before the end of the year mainly due to form. But at least something – otherwise there would be no GPU news until the end of the year.
Standalone Battlemage won’t be in laptops?
The comment explicitly mentions that it will only be the desktop GPU version of Battlemage that will be released this term, there will be no laptop models (unless it’s some kind of machine translation lie). This seems to fit with information from YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead, according to which Intel is not planning laptop versions of these graphics and Battlemage will have a purely desktop scope unlike the Alchemist generation.
This may be due to lack of interest from laptop manufacturers, with Intel failing to push Battlemage into any of their upcoming laptops. Recently, even the more established AMD has had big problems with this (probably because of this, its Radeon RX 7800M did not go on the market and only appeared with a long delay, when the OneXGPU company took pity and turned it into an external graphics card). It is possible that Nvidia is also making some behind-the-scenes pressures to cut out the competition from gaming laptops.
Golden Pig Upgrade did not say exactly what graphics will be released. So far, samples of the GPU have been leaked on the Internet, which has a 20 Xe Core with 2560 shaders and a 192-bit memory bus (so this card would probably carry 12 GB of memory). Cheaper chopped versions of the same GPU will probably exist with a 1792 shader (14 Xe Core) configuration. Intel was also preparing a GPU with 32 Xe Cores (4096 shaders) and 256-bit memory for more powerful graphics, but it is not clear whether these models will also be released in December. The Battlemage architecture seems to reach high frequencies, samples leaked to the Geekbench test database were reportedly clocked up to 2.85 GHz.
So there’s a chance that these cards could be decent and offer an attractive alternative to GeForce and Radeons (although of course it will also depend on drivers and in-game optimizations). However, new cards from AMD and Nvidia will be released shortly after them, so Intel will not have it easy.
Last chance?
And there is the question of whether the Battlemage graphics will also be the last. In their case, the death reports have turned out to be greatly exaggerated, but the next-generation Celestial is increasingly being talked about as completely canceled in terms of standalone graphics.
However, Intel will continue to develop graphics architectures because it simply needs them, so this does not mean that its GPU Arc will end completely (and support for the cards you buy now will evaporate). Instead, there will be a situation where Arc “Celestial” will exist, it will just be moved to processors and will only exist in integrated versions. But from a gaming perspective, it will be the same architecture, so software support will be common and continuity should remain.
Source: VideoCardz
Source: www.cnews.cz
