NVIDIA May Allegedly Take Issue With Board Partners Considering Intel Arc Battlemage
The latest such allegation comes from a suspect source: an unnamed industry contact speaking to Russian YouTube channel PRO Hi-Tech. Now, we've reported on PRO Hi-Tech before; the channel is well-known—especially in its native Russia—and probably wouldn't spread rumors if there weren't a kernel of truth behind them. However, it's also well-known that PRO Hi-Tech is a fan of Intel hardware, so take this story with an extra grain of salt.
The report says that NVIDIA is putting pressure on its largest board partners to keep them from fielding new graphics cards based on Intel's second-generation Arc GPUs, the architecture which is code-named Battlemage. A post on PRO Hi-Tech's Telegram channel goes on to say that Intel is shopping for launch partners for Battlemage, and that when word got out about the Blue Team courting first-tier board partners like ASUS and Gigabyte, NVIDIA got prickly and threatened the vendors, saying it's either green team or blue team—not both.
Will we see an ASUS ROG Intel Arc GPU, or perhaps a Gigabyte Windforce model? Maybe. Or maybe not, if NVIDIA has anything to say about it. It would be interesting to see more of AMD's partners (like ASRock) pick up Intel's cards. Powercolor, for example, could launch a "Blue Angel" or "Azure Dragon" model as a counterpart to its "Red Devil" and "Red Dragon" cards. Alternatively, maybe XFX or even Sapphire could ship some Arc GPUs. Only time will tell.
