Intel Battlemage Arc BMG-G31 GPU Support Surfaces, Hinting At Launch

This might just be the most will-they-or-won't-they GPU release story of all time. Intel's Arc Battlemage was rumored to come in two different versions as soon as we ever heard about it, but the larger "BMG-G31" chip never materialized and was rumored to be canceled. Then it appeared in leaks, and then it was rumored to have been canceled a long time before. And then it appeared in leaks again and again. Now it's looking like the long-rumored Arc B700 series might finally come to fruition, as even Intel itself is posting about it.

Intel VTune Profiler is a performance profiler for PC applications. It's intended to integrate with development environments like Visual Studio to give you an idea of where the performance bottlenecks in your applications are cropping up. In the latest release, version 2025.07, in the "New Features" section, there's a curious little note:


Now, why would Intel put this patch note in there if the so-called "Big Battlemage" GPU wasn't coming out? It's believable that the Vtune team might have added BMG-G31 support purely for internal testing, but in that case, it doesn't seem likely that the chip would have appeared in a public-facing patch note. This is arguably the strongest evidence so far that BMG-G31 will actually see a release.

Is that something to be excited about? Well, that depends on a lot of things. The Arc B570 and B580 are still reasonably compelling products in the sub-$300 price range, but the 8GB Radeon RX 9060 XT offers much better performance (when it's not VRAM-constrained) and is creeping down into the B580's price range. Battlemage as an architecture is still very comptetent, but we're dubious on the idea of a larger Battlemage GPU truly being competitive in the consumer gaming market against the $349 Radeon RX 9060 XT, to say nothing of cut-price RX 9070 cards.


With that said, based on the rumored specifications, BMG-G31 could have considerable advantages over the Radeon RX 9060 XT. It's supposed to have a full 256-bit memory bus, and a full PCI Express 5.0 x16 host interface. Given all the work that Intel has put into the Xe2 architecture's drivers over the last full year since the Arc B580's release, and especially if Intel has made any architectural tweaks to BMG-G31, it's quite possible that a hypothetical Arc B780 could be very attractive with the right price point.

Of course, there's still the DRAM shortage to consider, although it doesn't seem like GDDR6 memory has been hit quite as hard as other areas. Intel and its partners may be at a pricing disadvantage when bringing out a new GPU versus AMD and NVIDIA's slightly older designs that have already been put together and packaged with DRAM purchased at a sensible price point. We have no idea when this card might launch, but it's possible Intel could sneakily announce it at CES alongside its Panther Lake processors.