Intel's Arc Battlemage: New GPUs and Competitive Pricing

Intel's new Arc Battlemage GPUs promise budget-friendly performance, targeting gamers with impressive specs and aggressive pricing.

### Intel's Arc Battlemage: A Critical Crossroads for Budget Gamers
* 📉 Intel has faced significant challenges recently, including **processor degradation**, mass layoffs, and disappointing product launches, leading to a **tumultuous period** for the company.
* 💔 The anticipated Core Ultra 200 series, codenamed **Arrow Lake**, failed to impress, prompting major changes including the **departure of their CEO** and the introduction of **new Arc desktop GPUs**.
* 🎮 Intel's new graphics cards, the A580 and A570, are set to launch in December and January, respectively, offering **12GB and 10GB options** aimed at **enhancing gaming experiences** at **1080p and potentially 1440p**.
* 💰 Priced aggressively at **$249**, these cards are positioned to compete directly with Nvidia's RTX 4060, which has only **8GB of VRAM**, indicating a **strong value proposition for budget gamers**.
* ⚡ Significant improvements in efficiency and performance have been made, particularly in ray tracing capabilities, with Intel claiming a **64% frame rate improvement** over the RTX 4060 in selected scenarios.
* 🔍 The introduction of XeSS 2 aims to **enhance performance** through AI-driven upscaling and frame generation, promising a **45% reduction in latency** compared to native rendering.
* 📊 Despite these optimistic claims, there are concerns about the **validity of Intel's performance metrics**, urging consumers to **await full reviews** before making purchasing decisions.
* 🚀 If successful, the Battlemage launch could mark a **pivotal moment for Intel** in the competitive GPU market, especially as they aim to **reclaim market share from Nvidia and AMD** while catering to **budget-conscious gamers**.

Intel has gone through a bit of a rough patch recently, one so bad maybe we should be calling it a rough mile. Degradation found in their 13th and 14th gen processors was bad enough; then there were the mass layoffs and belt-tightening. Then they hoped that the Core

Ultra 200 series, codenamed Arrow Lake, would make a splash, but unfortunately, despite some interesting changes and impressive efficiency gains, it was more of a belly flop. So today they made two major announcements: their CEO is out, and also their Arc desktop

GPUs are finally getting a follow-up. To say that they need Arc Battlemage to be a win would be a gross understatement, but with the announcements made today, I am cautiously optimistic. If the numbers are to be believed, it is looking great for budget

gamers. But if this is yet another failure, I think 2024 could go down as the single worst year in Intel's existence. So I thought it was only fitting then that this segue—this one that I'm dragging out right now—should be remembered as the worst Ridge segue.

Black Friday might have just passed—[editor cut]—just passed by, but Ridge is keeping the discounts coming. Get your holiday gifts in and save up to 40% at ridge.com. LT here, please. Thank you. There's a lot of ground for us to cover,

but in a nutshell (you'll find nuts in this video), you'll find mostly a recap of the Battlemage announcement. Intel has confirmed that we are getting two new graphics cards: the A580 in mid-December and the A570 about a month later, in mid-January. More on the

Architectural and software improvements are coming soon, but these cards are 12GB and 10GB cards, respectively.  This means you should be very comfortable gaming at 1080p, and Intel is even saying the Arc A580 could be the

heart of a 1440p gaming machine. All of this for less money than Nvidia's RTX 4060, which only has 8GB of VRAM and is marketed as a 1080p card. The pricing, I've got to say, looks great, but

you don't have to look far for the motivation for this hyper-aggressive pricing. Arc Alchemist has barely registered on the Steam Hardware Survey, and it's been out for two years. So what has changed to give this new card a chance to compete? Well, kind of

everything. We first met Battle Mage alongside Intel's Lunar Lake mobile platform earlier this year. The big focus is efficiency. Their previous XE-based graphics cards required massive amounts of power and large silicon dies for meager performance.  Their changes focus on improving core utilization,

enabling smarter work distribution between those cores and reducing software overhead. They've made vast improvements to pretty much every part of the pipeline: improved vertex fetching, mesh shading, out-of-order sampling, blending throughput, and many more terms that, quite honestly, I don't expect the average gamer to care

about. But what you might care about is ray tracing. Each ray tracing unit is larger and can now handle 1.5x or 2x more calculations, further improving the already decent RT performance of Arc graphics. And thanks to the A580's 12GB of GDDR6 (not GDDR6X, sadly),

You are less likely to find your ray tracing performance bottleneck with Intel claiming a 64% frame rate improvement over the RTX 4060 in one cherry-picked example where the Arc A580 still runs below 60 frames per second.

Making that argument pretty questionable. But AI-accelerated matrix extensions, which can be described kind of as the tensor cores of Intel GPUs, are specifically designed to maximize performance with the matrix math typical of AI workloads, and they got some nice juice here.  XMX was already

pretty impressive, albeit under-supported on their server hardware, but here we get upgrades to support more data types and improved clock speeds, which could be a huge boon for people interested in running local models on the cheap. Intel is so confident in this that they're providing

a front end for generating your own AI images. Maybe they could use it to generate one like this. I kid, I kid. All of these improvements and features are coming on a card that will draw just 8.5% more power than its namesake predecessor. It's still a lot more power

than the RTX 4060, but is an impressive improvement in performance per watt nonetheless. But we always have to keep in mind these results are cherry-picked samples from Intel, so as always, I would encourage you guys to wait for our full

review. Speaking of sampling, launching alongside this new discrete card is XeSS 2, which is Team Blue's answer to DLSS 3 and frame generation. It packs a suite of AI-enhanced features, super-sampling to improve performance by rendering the game at a lower resolution.

Then, using AI to upscale it to your display, combined with AI-powered frame generation that will add fake frames based on both in-engine vector information and optical flow information to deal with the added latency of trying to add fake frames—a latency reduction solution plainly titled XE Low Latency.

Intel claims we can expect a 45% latency reduction over native rendering. Furthermore, they're bringing XESS support to Vulkan and DirectX 11, allowing developers to more easily implement the tech in existing and future games. Sounds promising, but...

Naturally, all of the caveats around the image quality of DLSS and FSR still apply here. Until we see it, maybe it's perfect, but I doubt it. But what about the price? I keep saying it's good, but I haven't said what it is. Well, you're...

going to have to wait for our review to see where this card actually lands when it comes to 1080p and 1440p performance. But what we know now is that at $249, I am—well, I'm extremely excited. Both of the incumbent players have...

treated the budget gaming segment like it isn't even worth their time and attention, but Intel looks dead set to bring back the—like—the capable sub-$500 gaming box. And this is the best outcome that I could have hoped for back when they threw their hat in the ring.

LTT hat! ProLTTstore.com, of course. We should be taking all of this with a grain of salt so big you could choke on it. But what Intel is claiming is a 26% average uplift in raster performance per dollar over the RX 7600 at 1440p Ultra.

which is across 47 games on a card that is $20 cheaper at MSRP. And then, if we look at ray tracing, which is one of Team Red's biggest weak points when compared to Nvidia, Team Blue comes out 37% ahead of that same card. There's less data

points here with only nine games tested, but that is still very, hopefully, impressive. And at $299, the RTX 4060 is allegedly getting slaughtered by Intel's new Arc 750. That Nvidia card costs about 20% more while delivering allegedly 32%

less raster performance per dollar and 25% less ray tracing performance per dollar at 1440p. So it looks like while the CPU team at Intel was busy trying to do something great, the GPU division may have been busy succeeding, allegedly. I can't wait to start testing these cards

and finding out where they actually land, both against the competition and against themselves. This card should crush it in just about every way. Yes, the memory bus width is substantially lower, but we've got a lot more VRAM and much higher clock speeds to help make 1440p gaming

possible. They're also launching alongside years of groundwork that was laid by the driver team that took the original Arc cards from the stuttery mess at launch to basically playable across the majority of PC games. Now, when we were discussing the leaks and the

Battlemage launch internally, we all agreed that this thing needed to be no more than $250, and at minimum it had to be on par with an RTX 4060 for performance for it to even matter. Anything more expensive or less performant, and they would have shot

shooting themselves in the foot moments before the race even began. Well, Intel's Battle Mage and Arc 2 graphics might be a little late to the party, but if these slides are to be believed, they were just busy stopping for more beverages and guests so they could keep

the party going. Their timing is also kind of good, in my opinion. It could be months before we see something like an RTX 5060 from Nvidia and an RX 8800 or whatever is next from AMD. Now, there's absolutely no telling how much better they might be,

but even a 20% improvement at the same price could still keep Intel on top of that lowest rung on the ladder. So the way that I see it, if we have to sacrifice Pat Gelsinger to summon our Dark Magician, well then that's just the heart

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first purchase and set your business up to make a splash heading into 2025. Oh God, it's 2025! Thanks for watching! If you guys like this video, go check out our Intel Arc live stream from back when they first launched it—um, it has improved a lot.

Intel had a WILD day

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Linus Tech Tips

Intel's Recent Struggles and the Arc Battlemage Announcement

Intel faced challenges including processor degradation, layoffs, and the underperformance of the Core Ultra 200 series.

Intel announced its CEO's departure and the release of its Arc desktop GPUs.

High hopes for Arc Battlemage's success, especially for budget gamers.

Two new graphics cards: A580 (mid-December) and A570 (mid-January).

A580 features 12GB VRAM, A570 has 10GB, targeting 1080p and potentially 1440p gaming.

Focus on efficiency improvements: better core utilization, reduced software overhead.

Improvements across the pipeline: vertex fetching, mesh shading, etc.

Enhanced ray tracing units with increased calculation capacity.

AI-accelerated matrix extensions (XMX) upgrades for improved AI performance.

Improved performance per watt compared to the predecessor, but still higher than RTX 4060.

XeSS 2, Intel's competitor to DLSS 3, with AI-enhanced features, super-sampling, and frame generation.

AI-powered frame generation with latency reduction (XE Low Latency).

Extended support to Vulkan and DirectX 11 for easier developer implementation.

A580 priced at $249, aiming to revitalize the budget gaming segment.

Claims of 26% average raster performance uplift per dollar over RX 7600 at 1440p Ultra.

Significant lead in ray tracing performance compared to RX 7600.

Alleged superior performance over RTX 4060 at 1440p in both rasterization and ray tracing.

High expectations for 1440p gaming despite lower memory bus width.

Improved drivers compared to the initial Arc launch.

Potential to maintain a leading position in the budget segment even with future releases from competitors.

Strategic timing considering potential future releases from Nvidia and AMD.