Intel Battlemage B580 GPU Spotted: What to expect from 2nd Gen ARC GPU  

Intel has been tight-lipped about its upcoming Battlemage GPU. There was no official confirmation, but several rumors suggested a Black Friday lunch, which later extended to December Lunch. This rumor seems to be true this time, as we have seen some packaging leaked through an Amazon listing revealing Asrock B580 Challenger and Steel Legends graphics cards.   

Battlemage hardware change   

So what is the change in the second iteration of ARC graphics cards? The full Battlemage lineup is not confirmed yet, but we have seen some major architectural changes in the leaked B580 cards. The memory bus is reduced to a 192-bit interface instead of the 256-bit found on the predecessor Arc A 580 graphics card. ARC Battlemage will utilize the PCIE-5.0 interface similar to the Nvidia RTX 5000 series, which technically provides double the bandwidth of a PCI-E 4.0 interface. 

The midrange B580 might use only 8X lanes from the PCI-E 5.0 bus; half of the PCI-E bus was not electrically wired, as shown in the leaked pictures. Technically an 8X PCI-E 5.0 lane provides the same bandwidth as a full 16X PCI-E 4.0 lane. The reduced PCI lanes and lower memory 192-bit memory interface help new generation ARC cards to provide better power consumption and allow users to add more peripherals as NVME storage devices. 

The good news is Intel Battlemage will stick to the old-fashioned 8-PIN power connector, allowing users to upgrade their GPU without changing the power supply. But, the Nvidia RTX 5000 series will require a 16-pin ATX 3.0 connector. We have seen a single 8-pin connector in the Asrock B580 Challenger cards, which means power consumption won’t exceed 225W (150W+75W), while the Steel Legends version has two 8-pin connectors that extend the power limit to 375W.  

Intel will stick to DDR6 memory similar to the previous ARC Alchemist card, but the memory capacity bumps 12GB. An 8GB VRAM surely can’t handle 1080P Epic settings for upcoming 2025 AAA titles. Recently published STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl sets new VRAM capacity standards of more than 8GB for mainstream 1080P gaming. The $400 RTX 4060ti 8GB edition can’t run this game on EPIC settings without Upscaler. However, the 16GB flagship Intel ARC A 770’s performance was also terrible in this title which we will investigate later. 

TSMC remains the fab partner for Battlemage, but this time we will get TSMC’s 4 nm EUV fabrication, expected to improve performance by 20-25% over 6NM Arc Alchemist cards. Clock speeds increased by 64% on the Battlemage B580, jumping to 2800MHz from 1700Mhz. 

Intel Battlemage DP 2.1 and UHBR 13.5 

A DP 2.1 port with UHBR 20 connectivity was expected as few monitors support DP 2.1 UHBR 20 specs, delivering 80GB bandwidth to drive uncompressed signals to a 4K 240Hz OLED monitor. Sadly, Intel might stick to UHBR 13.5, available in the AMD RX 7000 series. However, AMD’s 7000 series Workstation card does support UHBR 20 specs, though they aren’t designed for gaming. 

The ARC alchemist cards have DP 2.0 UHBR 10 specs which provide 40.0 Gbit/s speed, and the Battlemage series upgraded to a higher DP 2.1 UHBR 13 specs which technically support 4K 240Hz with DSC. However, the difference between uncompressed signals provided by UHBR 20 and UHBR 13.5 with DSC is barely noticeable.   

UE5 Games Underperforms in ARC Alchemist GPU 

Unreal Engine 5 is renowned for visually stunning games. The most hyped AAA titles Black Myth: Wukong and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl released in 2024 are based on Unreal Engine. This trend will surely continue in 2025. These games heavily used the UE5 Nanite feature which seriously tanks performance on ARC cards. Yes, these games are playable on ARC cards using frame generation and upscaling but performance isn’t impressive against their competitor’s GPU from Nvidia and AMD. 

We have seen that the flagship ARC A 770 gets hammered by RTX 4060 with high settings. However, the  EPIC settings take the 16GB VRAM advantage on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, which demands more than 8GB VRAM. Sadly, this victory faded away when graphical settings were lowered. The ARC cards render Unreal Engine Nianite feature on the driver level, and the performance got a massive penalty. Hopefully, Battlemage will change this picture, several rumors suggest that Blattlemage will shift to hardware rendering for Nainite objects. 

Fixing the ARC Alchemist Mistakes     

As a first-generation GPU, ARC Alchemist has several issues such as high idle power consumption and poor performance in DX9 titles. Over the last two years, Intel’s driver team fixed most of the DX 9 driver-related issues and managed to lower idle power consumption after some tweaks. Sadly, that method doesn’t work with all AIB models. 

Intel’s driver still doesn’t support 10-bit SDR color over the DP port. However, some tweaks fix the 10-bit SDR color on the ARC Alchemist card using the HDMI port, Intel should fix this problem in Battlemage.   

Intel’s Frame Generation ExtraSS

Intel’s upscaling method Xess is now widely adopted and supports over 200 games on the Stream library but their frame-generation technique ExtraSS isn’t available yet. Intel’s GPU owners often use AMD’s FSR technology as an alternative, which is optimized for AMD’s GPUs. Several reports confirmed that Intel is working on its frame-generation technique named ExtraSS, yet to be released. We have high expectations of ExtraSS coming soon with the second iteration of Intel’s discrete GPU.