The future release date of Intel Arc Battlemage GPUs is looking rather uncertain, according to the latest reports, potentially scuppering the prospects of success for Intel’s second-generation Arc graphics cards. Where once the blue team hoped it would release a new GPU architecture every year, it seems the reality will be much closer to one every three.
While there’s no sign of Intel Arc A series pixel pushers in our best graphics card list right now, a huge amount of progress has been made in addressing the issues that first plagued Alchemist GPUs. Despite these improvements naturally transferring to Battlemage, its predicted launch window could set back what could be otherwise enticing products.
Speaking to their sources, YouTuber Moore’s Law Is Dead (MLID) shared comments made by an alleged insider at Intel that shared some details about the state of Intel Arc Battlemage development. They claim, “final [Battlemage] validation is targeting Q4 2024 at the earliest,” with references to Q1 2025 serving as the final deadline.
As MLID rightly highlights, “once something is validated, it takes one to three months to actually come out.” With this in mind, we shouldn’t expect to see Intel Arc Battlemage graphics cards this year, and worst-case scenario leaves us with a Q2 2025 release date.
This naturally puts something of a dampener on previous hopes shared by Intel fellows that Battlemage would launch in 2024, which could also serve as the year both the RTX 5000 series and RDNA 4 graphics cards materialize. Should both AMD and Nvidia debut new architectures in that time, it would put Intel even more on the backfoot than it already is.
As someone that was excited to see what Intel could deliver with Arc, I live in hope that the company can overcome the difficulties it faced with Alchemist and is currently facing with Battlemage. While Nvidia dominates the high-end with the likes of the RTX 4090, the budget space still has plenty of space for more competition, with the RX 7600 and RTX 4060 not exactly dazzling with their value.
Had the Intel Arc A770 or A750 launched in the state and price that the graphics cards are now currently, recommending them in spite of their current quirks would’ve been much easier and everyone would have benefitted for it. We can only hope that this potential is realised in Battlemage successors, when they eventually arrive.
Check out our best graphics card list if you’re in the market for a new GPU, and be sure to give our Radeon RX 7600 XT review a read if you’re after something on the cheaper side.