Rumor mill: Intel has remained tight-lipped about its plans for next-generation Battlemage graphics playing cards up to now, however they’re definitely hoping to keep away from the a number of delays that plagued the launch of the Alchemist lineup in 2022. Current leaks and reviews point out that the corporate needs to start shipments earlier than the top of this yr.
Sources on the 2024 Embedded World Convention instructed ComputerBase that Intel hopes to introduce its second-generation devoted graphics playing cards – codenamed Battlemage – earlier than Black Friday this yr. The brand new GPUs might launch round November, supplied the corporate meets its timetable.
A leaked inside roadmap and a public presentation slide from final yr indicated that Intel meant to launch Battlemage someday in 2024. The report from Embedded World means that Chipzilla needs to beat the vacation purchasing season, throughout which it’s going to doubtless compete towards new graphics playing cards from Nvidia and AMD.
Nonetheless, Intel has to show it might keep its roadmap, which it missed when launching the Alchemist sequence in 2022. The corporate deliberate to achieve huge availability early that yr. As a substitute, it solely managed a gradual rollout in China earlier than delivery the Arc A750 and A770 to different nations in October.
The delays put Alchemist behind the efficiency curve in comparison with its contemporaries – price range and mainstream fashions from Nvidia’s RTX 4000 sequence and AMD’s Radeon RX 7000 lineup. Inefficient drivers have additionally been a persistent drawback for Intel, however quite a few software program updates have dramatically improved DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 efficiency on Arc playing cards. Important enhancements for XeSS and PresentMon additionally present that Intel stays dedicated to devoted GPUs regardless of the setbacks.
Actual particulars on particular person Battlemage playing cards are scarce, nevertheless it’s attainable that the brand new era will characteristic an enthusiast-level GPU, in contrast to Alchemist which solely included mainstream and entry-level merchandise. Primarily based on the Xe2 microarchitecture, Intel’s subsequent era GPUs ought to arrive with enhancements in rasterization, ray tracing, and AI upscaling.
Graphics card distributors anticipate Nvidia to unveil fanatic and high-end RTX 5000 merchandise within the fourth quarter of this yr. The upcoming GeForce RTX 5080 might deal with ray tracing on par with the present flagship, the RTX 4090. In the meantime, that card’s successor – the 5090 – is anticipated to offer a 70-percent efficiency increase and a 512-bit reminiscence bus. Each playing cards and presumably the RTX 5070 will reportedly embrace GDDR7 VRAM.
In the meantime, AMD ought to launch its RDNA 4 sequence someday this yr, however it is going to solely embrace mid-range and mainstream {hardware}. Current reviews point out {that a} mid-range Radeon RX 8000 card may outperform the RTX 4070Ti at a a lot lower cost.
