Intel’s new Arc GPU range, codenamed Battlemage, could launch as soon as December this year, potentially before the Nvidia RTX 5000 lineup is launched. The new Intel GPU boxes have been listed as being prepped for shipping, indicating that the hardware is almost ready for release.
The first Intel dedicated graphics cards, which we tested in our Intel Arc A770 review, launched back in 2022, hitting the mid to low-end sector of the market. While offering a cheaper alternative to AMD and Nvidia’s GPUs, Intel’s first offerings were inundated with issues and needed constant driver patches to improve performance.
The new GPUs could hit sooner than anticipated, though, as the aforementioned shipping manifest, shared by tech leaker X86 is dead&back in a post on X (formerly Twitter), dates back to September. While the shipping notes simply concern the packaging for a graphics card, it also clearly states “Intel BMG 580” in the description. The dimensions of 192 x 89 x 381mm also suggest the card is quite small, and possibly a budget model.
This isn’t the first time the Intel Battlemage launch has been rumored to be arriving in December 2024, as we first reported in November. Intel appears to be getting ahead of the competition’s hotly anticipated next-generation of cards. Nvidia is rumored to be planning to reveal the RTX 5000 series at CES 2025, which starts on January 7, 2025.
Intel’s next line of cards is still expected to hit the lower-end spectrum of hardware. Arc’s pricing has lent itself to some solid budget builds as the hardware has been updated. While it doesn’t feature the best-in-class performance outside the 1080p range in some games, Intel’s GPUs have begun to appear more frequently in minimum game specs, as you can see in the Avowed system requirements. We’ve also had a preview of Battlemage performance with the Intel Lunar Lake launch, which Intel demonstrates in the video below.
The hardware company is expected to release three variations of the Battlemage GPUs, featuring its Xe2 cores. Its most powerful model, the BMG-31, could use 32 Xe2 cores, with lower models featuring 24 and 20 cores, according to Battlemage specs rumors.
If you want to buy a new graphics card right now, then check out our guide to the best graphics card, where we take you through all our favorite options to suit a range of budgets.
