Intel’s second generation of Arc desktop GPUs, the architecture for which is codenamed Battlemage, could be arriving in 2024, beating both AMD and Nvidia to the next-gen punch, if the latest rumors are to be believed. Both AMD and Nvidia’s next generation of GPUs are expected to arrive in early 2025, so if an Intel Arc Battlemage release date does arrive this side of the new year, it could greatly bolster the company’s place in the graphics card market.
Intel‘s first round of Arc GPUs weren’t exactly the immediate best graphics card guide contenders, particularly thanks to their dodgy game stability and compatibility when they first launched. However, after many regular driver updates in the intervening couple of years, they’ve become solidly reliable options, just without the top-tier performance of AMD and Nvidia’s competing offerings. Battlemage, though, is expected to bring a significant jump in performance.
The new Intel Arc Balttemage release date rumor comes from a user on Chinese site Wiebo.com (and comes to us via Videocardz), who claims they attended an “internal exchange” meeting between Intel and Asus. At this meeting, it was reportedly revealed that “Intel will release new GPUs by the end of the year with significant performance improvements” (machine translation).
With so little to go on, it’s next to impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions about just how significant those performance improvements might be, and whether “by the end of the year” means December 31 or well in time for the holiday season.
All that said, we have seen previous Intel Battlemage specs leaks before, which have even revealed some benchmark numbers. Two Battlemage graphics cards broke cover as new entries in the SiSoftware benchmark database, and revealed data such as the Xe core counts, clock speeds, and VRAM capacity of two new GPUs.
Both cards were apparently equipped with 8MB of L2 cache, 12GB of VRAM, and a 1.8GHz clock speed, but have different Xe Core counts and Vector Engines. Notably, in this benchmark, one of these GPUs actually performed worse than the Intel Arc A750, so it’s very much still early days in terms of knowing how these new chips might perform.
As for AMD and Nvidia’s next-generation GPUs, we expect AMD RDNA 4 graphics cards to arrive either later this year or early next year, with the sad rumor being that AMD isn’t expected to compete with Nvidia for the top end of the graphics card market.
Meanwhile, we can expect to see Nvidia’s Blackwell RTX 5000 series cards again either later this year or more likely early next year, with Nvidia’s upcoming flagship RTX 5090 expected to be as much as 50% faster than the RTX 4090 in some scenarios.