Maingear Commits To Carrying Arc Graphics Cards As Intel Talks Up Battlemage GPUs
You're probably tired of hearing this from Intel, as this isn't the first or second time the company has done the rounds with the press to get the word out about its continual driver refinement efforts. As Tom points out, though, Intel has been the only GPU company to put out game-specific drivers for a few recent big titles, including Hogwarts Legacy and Atomic Heart. Unsurprisingly, Arc GPUs punch above their weight in those titles.
As part of the interview, Tom also talked a little about the next generation of Intel Arc, codenamed Battlemage. He was understandably unwilling to give any specific details on the hardware itself, but his comments were pretty illuminating anyway. According to TAP, the "bulk" of AXG is working on Battlemage, and "progress is accelerating and moving along quite quickly." Apparently, Battlemage will include some "cool new technologies," although TAP declined to elaborate on that remark.
He did say that, as part of the development of Battlemage, Intel "fixed some ... architecture bugs." It was rumored well before the launch of Alchemist that the GPUs missed Intel's performance targets due to major silicon bugs, and more recently, it has been rumored that Battlemage is heavily based on Alchemist. One leaker went so far as to say that Battlemage is essentially a "fixed" Alchemist. That's clearly not exactly the case, based on TAP's statements, but it will be interesting to see if Battlemage can more consistently approach its peak performance.
An Arc A770 certainly isn't going to hold a candle to the GeForce RTX 4080 that was the MG-1 desktop we reviewed, but Maingear sells a whole range of products for potential purchasers at various price tiers. An Arc A750 or A770 is still quite a bit of graphics horsepower, capable of handling even ray-traced games with aplomb. Given the low price points—A750s at retail are going for just $249 now—that could make for some impressive price-to-performance.
