Intel's Battlemage GPUs for Budget Desktops Conjure Up Competitive Value

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Intel’s next-generation GPU for graphics cards, Battlemage, is finally ready to take on AMD and Nvidia in the budget gaming market after much anticipation.

The first two Battlemage graphics cards, the Intel Arc B580 and Arc B570, are priced at $249 and $219, respectively, and ship with numerous upgrades over Intel’s last generation of graphics cards. Intel says this will enable them to conquer this market segment handily, but we'll save our take on that for our full review coming soon.

Battlemage: The Science Behind the Magic

The new architecture inside Intel’s next generation of graphics cards is known as “Battlemage,” which has been extended to refer to the graphics family as a whole. Battlemage retains some similarities to Intel’s previous graphics architecture, Alchemist, but some substantial differences should significantly alter performance.

The top solution at launch will be the Intel Arc B580 with a BMG-G21 GPU die with 20 2nd Gen Xe Cores, which hold eight vector engines each for 160 and 160 Matrix Engines total. The vector engines are the leading performance drivers on the graphics card, which have been upgraded to support SIMD16 parallel processing natively. A set of 20 texture samplers in the B580 have eight texture mapping units (TMUs) each for a total of 160, and there are 10 pixel backends with eight raster operation processors (ROPs) each for 80 total.

To keep these shaders fed with data, Intel also increased the throughput in the GPU in various ways. Each Xe core now has a 256KB L1 cache shared between the vector and matrix engines. This is backed up by 18MB of L2 cache on the B580.

Battlemage’s Geometry engine reportedly has triple the vertex fetch throughput and triple the mesh shading performance that Alchemist had, while the ROPs also have up to double the blending throughput. The TMUs also have up to double the throughput, and Intel added 8:N compression to boost data throughput.

Intel’s new Battlemage GPUs will also feature the company’s second generation of ray-tracing hardware. The company gave a few details on this upgraded ray-tracing engine, but it didn’t quite explain just how much better it is compared with the ray-tracing hardware on Alchemist. Given that Alchemist had relatively strong ray-tracing capabilities, we expect this newer ray-tracing hardware will perform relatively well against the competition.

Battlemage also now supports what Intel calls “Native Execute Indirect,” which enables it to respond faster to API calls. Depending on the task, the GPU can perform some tasks milliseconds faster than a comparable Alchemist graphics card. This may not seem like a big deal until you consider the cumulative effect this can have over thousands of API calls. Accumulatively, Intel reported that all these changes resulted in a 70% increase in performance, with 50% higher performance per watt for Battlemage over Alchemist.

Intel's XeSS & Software Enhancements

Alongside Battlemage, Intel is introducing several new software technologies to help its graphics cards compete better. Many of these are evolutions of Intel’s XeSS technology. XeSS works similarly to AMD’s FSR and Nvidia’s DLSS technology by reducing a game's rendering resolution and then upscaling the images to fit the target resolution. XeSS 2 aims to do this faster and with better image quality, but this technology has multiple parts.

The base level XeSS 2 will do just as detailed above, but it also supports frame generation similar to DLSS 3. This works differently from standard XeSS as it takes two already rendered frames and interpolates a frame halfway between them to create an illusion of more fluid motion. Intel said its software uses two separate AIs to generate and blend these frames into the video playback and takes full advantage of the matrix engines on the GPU for this purpose.

By taking advantage of both XeSS2 and XeSS frame generation, Intel said that in some situations, as few as one in eight pixels may be rasterized by the graphics card, with the other seven out of eight pixels all being artificially created by AI. This significantly reduces the workload on the GPU and helps to increase overall frame rates significantly.

Intel is also introducing XeLL, which stands for Xe Low Latency and is the Intel equivalent of Nvidia’s Reflex technology. This technology aims to improve the overall responsiveness of a system running an Intel graphics card.

These software technologies aim to improve performance while maintaining compatibility with Intel’s last-generation Alchemist cards. However, you won’t be able to use all of these technologies on other graphics cards, as the frame generation technology in XeSS currently relies on the matrix engines that are only present on Intel GPUs. This is a significant difference, as XeSS is a universal technology that works on almost any graphics card.

Detailing the Battlemage Cards

The BMG-G21 GPU die that powers the Battlemage Intel Arc B580 flagship supports up to a 192-bit memory interface that is fully utilized on the B580 and connects the GPU to a 12GB pool of GDDR6 memory. We don’t quite have fixed clock rates for this card, but Intel reported a graphics clock of 2,670MHz, the clock speed Intel said the card will most often maintain during gaming sessions. The card also has just a single eight-pin PCIe power connection, rated to pull just 190 watts. This card will launch on Dec. 13 for $249.

Intel’s second Battlemage graphics card will be the Arc B570, which will ship on Jan. 16 at $219. This card is likely also using the BMG-G21 GPU die but has some parts of its hardware disabled, leaving just 18 out of the 20 Xe cores enabled. It also has a lower graphics clock of 2,500MHz, a narrower 160-bit memory interface, and just 10GB of GDDR6. As a plus, it only uses 150W of power, though.

Intel appears to have settled on a naming convention that makes identifying these graphics cards easy. All new Intel Arc Battlemage graphics cards, like the B580 and B570, have a “B” prefix before the model number. Intel did the same with its last-generation Alchemist graphics cards, like the A580 and A770, and this should make identifying GPUs of different generations quite easy so long as Intel sticks to this system.

Can Battlemage Defeat the Competition?

Intel’s new Battlemage graphics architecture and the new graphics cards interest us a lot, with strong signs that they will perform well in the current market. Those last two words are key, though.

First, against Intel’s previous line of Alchemist graphics cards, Intel clearly expects the Arc B580 to come out on top. This may sound like a given, but the best Arc Alchemist card, the Arc A770, had 32 Xe cores, and the second-best Arc A750, had 28 Xe cores. Intel avoided directly showing the performance difference between A770 and B580, but it reported that B580 should be, on average, 24% faster than A750. These numbers suggest that the B580 should also be faster than the A770, though likely not by an enormous amount.

Far more important is how well the B580 will do against competing AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. Here, Intel said the Arc B580 should be, on average, 10% faster than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 while running games at 1440p with ultra settings. Naturally, we will need to test the B580 before we can be sure of this, but from the numbers alone, we’re inclined to believe Intel’s claims are valid until proven otherwise.

Intel made a point to draw attention to the far greater bandwidth the B580 has over its competition, and this, along with its other enhancements, strongly suggests it should perform better at 1440p than the AMD Radeon RX 7600 or the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060. This is partly because those cards have narrower 128-bit memory interfaces that hamper their performance at higher resolutions. The B580, with its 192-bit interface, will likely gain the upper hand at higher resolutions over these competitors, but we also wouldn’t be surprised to see a tie or even see the B580 lose at 1080p.

Either way, assuming Intel’s performance claims are true and that Battlemage has some impressive improvements over Alchemist, it’s likely that the B580 is already running on borrowed time. It may offer better performance per dollar at launch than the competition and even have better performance at 1080p or 1440p than the competition, but we also shouldn’t forget that the AMD Radeon RX 7600 and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 are both 2023 graphics cards.

AMD and Nvidia’s next generations of graphics cards are right around the corner, and it wouldn’t at all be surprising that we see new cards replace both of these sometime next year. If the B580 is to have any success and help Intel gain market share, Battlemage will need to hit the ground running and get into as many PCs as possible before these upcoming competitors arrive.