The Graphics card world has been dominated by AMD and Nvidia for far too long. A few years back, Intel decided to toss their hat in the ring and launched their Arc GPUs. Since then rumors have been floating around about the latest hardware but today, on December 3rd 2024, we got an official announcement from Intel that Project Battlemage (or B Series) is very close.

Intel, well known for their CPUs,  made the official announcement with a Newsroom post on their website and subsequent Twitter/X account posts as well. The cards are the Intel Arc B580 and the Arc B570.  The article boasts about the new GPUs new “X^e2 architecture, optimized to deliver improved efficiency and higher performance per core with less software overhead.”

Intel also states there new X^e2 cores will support new technology, which are X^eSS Super Resolution, X^eSS Frame Generation, and X^e Low Latency. They also state these new GPUs will offer up to 70% more performance per core than the previous generation and up to 50% more performance per watt. As a reminder, however, these are Intel’s numbers, and until these are out in the wild and 3rd party testers have had their time with them, I’d take those numbers and for that matter any numbers these companies give you with a grain of salt.

The Arc B580 features 12GB of RAM and the B570 features 10GB of RAM. Considering the B580 is said to be competing with the Nvidia 4060 and AMD 7600xt, both of which only have 8GB of RAM, I’m pretty happy to see this on lower end cards. These lower RAM numbers tend to hamstring lower end cards, and it would appear that’s not an issue here.

Since the new Battlemage cards are still part of the Arc family hopefully we don’t have as many driver issues as the first generation cards did, particularly as it relates to Direct X 9 and Direct X 11 games but we will know for sure soon. By all accounts, when the first gen cards launched when they worked, they were great, but they struggled particularly with older titles.

The Arc B580 will launch on December 13th, 2024, at $249 USD, and the B570 will launch on January 16th, 2025, at $219. At this time, I do not have Canadian pricing on hand. Are you excited to see these new cards launch? Comment below.