Intel Confirms Battlemage, 2nd Gen Arc Discrete Graphics Cards, To Feature Cool New Technologies & Architectural Fixes, Bulk of Team Working On It

Intel will be bringing some exciting new features with its 2nd Generation graphics cards based on the Arc Battlemage GPU architecture.

During the latest edition of PCWorld's "The Full Nerd" podcast, Intel Arc's spokesperson, Tom Petersen, or TAP as the industry likes to call him, mentioned the overall journey of their first gen GPU architecture, codenamed Alchemist and what we can expect in the future. Starting off with Intel's Alchemist or 1st Generation of Arc, TAP states that the sales are where the company had expected and that can get even better given the value proposition that Intel's offering such as a recent price drop on the Arc A750 which brought it down to just $249 US.

Petersen also mentioned the driver progress that the software and dev team has made over the last couple of months. Not only were they able to do an absolutely great job of fixing some of the major API performance issues in DX9 but also delivered on a vast array of day-0 and day-1 driver releases for the latest AAA games. In fact, the number of those releases has now exceeded what AMD offers and is right on par with NVIDIA which is very impressive.

All of this work is definitely going to prove helpful in building the 2nd generation discrete GPU and graphics card lineup known as Arc Battlemage. While Tom can't talk specifics yet, he did state that the bulk of their design team (both architecture and software side) is now working on it and the architecture itself will feature some cool new technologies and most importantly, it will address some of the issues discovered on the architecture-level on Alchemist GPUs. These issues wouldn't have been there if Intel already had a first generation out but now that they do, they can fix those and make Battlemage work even better right off the bat.

Obviously, I am not going to disclose new dates for Battlemage or specs but I can say that the bulk of our design team, both on the architecture and software side, are working on it and progress is accelerating and moving along quite quickly. There are some cool new technologies that I want to talk about that I won't but let's just say that Battlemage is our 2nd generation discrete graphics card, it's moving along as expected and the bulk of our team is on it.

Tom Petersen - Intel Graphics Spokesperson (via PCWorld)

Emphasis was made on better DX12 scaling, better ray tracing capabilities, and even AI. However, it looks like Intel isn't yet ready to accept NVIDIA's AI-driven Frame Generation technology which they say is unwanted for AI to do that kind of work. That's not to say that Frame Generation isn't better but the approach that the green team took may be unwarranted. AMD made similar comments last week in an interview where David Wang, head of RTG, stated that while NVIDIA's strategy is definitely great, they find that AI can be useful in other places.

We should remember that both Intel and NVIDIA particularly use AI hardware on their GPUs for upscaling techniques such as XeSS and DLSS. AMD's FSR 3 is to come out last this year but so far the company hasn't detailed much about it besides stating a 2x performance gain over FSR 2. FG (Frame Generation) through AI is a completely different topic and if Intel and AMD were to enable it on their GPUs, it will be interesting to see what approach they take.

Is Battlemage going to be better? I absolutely expect so, it's a new technology, it's a new architecture, we fixed some known bugs, let's call it architecture bugs (things), that had we already had our first generation we wouldn't have done. Think about how much we have learned this generation and all of that has been pushed into Battlemage so you'll see better scaling on DX12, better ray tracing, things that you'd expect us to do as we move forward on a discrete cadence.

Tom Petersen - Intel Graphics Spokesperson (via PCWorld)

The following features have already been rumored for the Xe2 Battlemage GPUs:

As for the lineup, recent roadmap leaks have pointed out that there will be a soft refresh of the Arc Alchemist lineup codenamed Alchemist+ later this year but Battlemage is scheduled for 2024 & we can expect more information later this year. We know that Intel is working on two Battlemage GPU variants known as Xe2-HPG for Discrete and Xe2-LPG for Integrated and once again, Raja Koduri is committed to the Arc GPU roadmap. Intel is also saying that it will try its best to not disappoint the gaming community in the future and gamers can expect the same perf per $ proposition that we've got with the first generation of Arc. You should definitely give the full interview a watch below: