Intel appears to be gearing up for the upcoming Battlemage graphics card line sooner rather than later. New patches show the manufacturer confirming support for the next generation of GPU hardware.
As spotted by Videocardz, Intel continues to release patches that enable display support for Battlemage graphics cards. The latest patch, v4 00/19, suggests that upcoming models won’t utilise DisplayPort 2.1. Instead, they’ll reportedly have a maximum output of 13.5Gbps, as the brand has supposedly removed UHBR20 (20Gbps) support. This hints that the next line from Team Blue may not be as powerful as speculated.
This is consistent with Alchemist GPUs, which currently support DisplayPort 1.4, whereas DisplayPort 2.1 offers around three times the bandwidth. It makes sense, considering that even Intel’s top-end GPUs are entry-level compared to current AMD and Nvidia alternatives, and 1.4 can technically reach 4K120, not that you’ll achieve that through any of the current Arc line. By this leak, it looks as though it will be a similar story for Battlemage, too.
Battlemage should be an improvement over Alchemist, however, as the full patch notes from Freedesktop show support for UHBR13.5. This isn’t currently possible through any of the current Arc cards. It’s hard to gauge at this stage exactly how much of an improvement the next generation will be, but the fact Team Blue is introducing patches means that the supposed release window before Black Friday could be on track. That still gives the manufacturer over six months to finish development and production ready for the November rollout.
It’s currently unknown as to whether this release window refers to discrete desktop GPUs or through utilisation as baked onto the chip as integrated graphics with the upcoming Arrow Lake and future Lunar Lake processors. It’s the second chance for Intel in the graphics card game after Alchemist’s troubled launch, driver problems, and less-than-leading hardware.
