With all hell letting loose recently within Intel headquarters, at least Team Blue is ready to unveil its next-gen GPU for budget buys and value-centric PC users. Enter the new Intel Battlemage consisting of the Arc B580 and Arc B570.
After many wonky events from fixing its 13th/14th Gen Core processor’s BIOS nightmare to yesterday’s sudden oust of “now former” CEO Pat Gelsinger, it is nice to see at least something great and working for Team Blue after the Core Ultra 200S lineup scoring various positive feedback from the community. Therefore, the Battlemage GPU will be the most exciting product.
Anyway, the new GPU duo is getting improvements in ray tracing and AI upscaling via XeSS 2 for a very compelling 1080p and 1440p gaming experience that only requires less than US$300 bucks. In terms of XeSS 2 itself, it uses the new AI-powered engine Intel Xe Matrix Extensions (XMX) to power things like low latency mode and frame generation.
The Xe2 architecture also helps on the hardware level with improved rasterization capability with reduced overhead as well. Being a GPU released in 2024, of course, it will support some of the latest AI workloads, inferencing at the very least (Anyone cared to train some models with Intel cards?).
Various benchmarks also showed that the B580 is ahead of the A750 by about 24% in 1440p therefore its US$249 is quite enticing to those who despise Team Green’s GeForce RTX 4060 being such an overpriced yet low-performing GPU. As for the B570, it starts from US$219. In terms of VRAM, the B580 gets 12GB GDDR6 while the B570 takes it down a bit to 10GB respectively but honestly, this is still “usable” for games released this year and beyond for just 1080p gaming and 1440p through selective settings.
And yes, only 1 8-pin PCIe power connector is all you need to get it juiced up with most AIB designs as well as official reference cards holding 2 fans for cooling. Speaking of AIB, we can see brands like Acer and ASRock pushing out their own offering as well as other names including Maxsun, Sparkle, Onix, Gunnir, and more.
With all being said, only time can tell if the performance claims match what Intel promised so let’s wait until the cards officially make it into the hands of fellow gamers and reviewers.
