At the end of the year or at the latest at the beginning of 2025, Intel should bring the second generation of its Arc gaming graphics cards. Their previous generation Alchemist suffered from various bugs (for example, high off-load consumption persists) and has a less mature ecosystem than competitors, but it is still the most successful (and so far the only usable) attempt to produce an alternative to GeForce A Radeon graphics. The new generation of Battlemage could perhaps take it further.
Intel has actually already released the first demo of Battlemage’s GPU capabilities, as this architecture is used as an integrated GPU in the new Lunar Lake mobile processors that went on sale this week in the first notebooks. Lunar Lake has 1024 shaders of the Xe2 LPG architecture (which is internal marking, the standalone Battlemage GPUs will have the Xe2 HPG architecture) and looks to be able to compete against the RDNA 3.5 architecture in AMD’s previously released Ryzen AI 300s. The performance of both solutions with a configuration of 1024 shaders is very close, and at least in some benchmarks Intel leads, although Lunar Lake may help with faster memory.
But this suggests that the Battlemage graphics could be successful even in a standalone version for the desktop, and currently there is another evidence for this, the GPU Battlemage benchmark leak, according to which these graphics will probably reach very decent clock frequencies, which could significantly improve their competitiveness against The alchemist.
2.85 GHz desktop GPU
In August, information about Battlemage graphics with 14 Xe Core (1792 shaders) leaked online, which was apparently a cut-down version of the GPU with 20 Xe Core (2560 shaders). Now the Battlemage has appeared again, but in the Geekbench benchmark database, and this time it seems to be a card with the full 20 Xe Core and 2560 shaders active. Geekbench reports this width as 160 “Compute Units”. This number probably corresponds to the number of EUs, which is an older way of marking units in Intel graphics, but in Battlemage one EU apparently has 16 shaders instead of the previous 8.
But the most interesting data is the frequency that Geekbench recognizes for the GPU – according to its detection, the GPU clock is 2850 MHz. It could probably be the boost rate that the GPU has set, but it still looks pretty promising. Alchemist’s GPU performance was limited by relatively low frequencies, and solving this problem could help a lot.
According to the Geekbench detection, the GPU has about 12 GB of memory (which would mean a 192-bit memory bus), so it should probably be a mainstream card, as the number of computing units also suggests. According to leaks, the Battlemage is supposed to be capable of a memory frequency of 19.0 GHz, which would give the card a throughput of 456 GB/s.
The GPU is a desktop card as it was tested with an Intel Core i5-13600K in an MSI Pro Z790-A Wifi board. It is reported as Intel Xe Graphics RI and it is not clear whether it is an ES sample or a configuration that will actually be released, because the final name for graphics is set only by the drivers (it could be Arc B750, for example). According to PCI ID 8086:E20B, it should be a “Battlemage G21” GPU or BMG-G21.
The BMG-G21 could probably be a relatively cheaper Battlamage variant. It is unclear if the Battlemage generation will also have an even cheaper lowend model like the Alchemist generation (cards like the Arc A380 with the ACM-G11 chip). But according to older reports, perhaps there should be a more powerful version in the form of a chip BMG-G31. It apparently has 32 Xe cores again, which would give 4096 shaders, and 256-bit memory width. Thanks to the improved architecture, higher GPU frequencies and also GDDR6 memory (at 19.0 GHz the throughput would be 608 GB/s, at 20.0 GHz then 640 GB/s) the graphics with this chip should have significantly better performance than what achieved by the Arc A770 models.
It’s not entirely clear when these graphics will be released, but according to various behind-the-scenes reports, Intel wants to release them ideally before the end of November in time for the pre-Christmas shopping season. This again appeared in information that Intel representatives allegedly shared at a seminar hosted by Asus this summer. So these graphics could possibly reach the market even before the end of the year. We will see how interesting the specialization of the offer will be in the end.
Resources: VideoCardz, Geekbench
Source: www.cnews.cz
