Since CES 2024, Intel hasn’t said so much as a peep about its launch plans for Battlemage graphics cards. Given the company’s financial status, many began to worry dedicated Xe2 GPUs wouldn’t see the light of day. Thankfully, this seemingly isn’t the case at all, and new Arc pixel pushers will hit the scene before 2025.
Based on what Intel told us about its Xe2 GPU architecture, Battlemage will be a very different beast to Alchemist. The company claims to have eliminated practically all the compatibility problems current Arc cards have. They’ll also perform better with and without ray tracing enabled. It’s too early to say how these claims hold up, but we’re excited to hear they’re en route regardless.
This rare bit of good news for Team Blue comes from 小敌鸽, a.k.a. Little Pigeon (via Videocardz). We have this leaker to thank for Arrow Lake power draw leaks, too. According to Pigeon, an Intel representative said Battlemage would arrive before the end of the year. Of course, they also claimed that they’ll boast significant performance improvements.
Looking past the marketing spiel, Battlemage has an uphill battle ahead of it. Nvidia RTX 50 series and AMD RDNA 4 GPUs should begin to replace current picks for the best graphics cards at the start of 2025. While we don’t expect either stack to launch all at once, Xe2 effectively needs to compete with today’s and tomorrow’s favourites, including Ryzen AI 300 series integrated graphics.
Lunar Lake CPUs will provide the first glimpse at Battlemage and could help shape our expectations for desktop cards. At the very least, we’re excited to see how handhelds like MSI Claw 8 AI Plus hold up with more competent Arc GPUs at their disposal.
Until new Arc cards emerge, give our Radeon RX 7600 review and GeForce RTX 4060 review a read. If Intel pursues a similar strategy to Alchemist, those two graphics cards will be the main competition for Battlemage GPUs for now.
