Intel Is Ready To Take Its Second Crack At Discrete Gaming GPUs With Arc Battlemage “Xe2”: Larger Configs, Faster Memory & Bigger Caches

Intel is ready to enter the market with its 2nd Gen Arc discrete GPUs codenamed Battlemage, powered by the Xe2 core architecture.

In the latest episode of Intel's "Talking Tech" series, Thomas Petersen aka TAP discussed what to expect from the upcoming Xe2 GPU architecture, first featured on Lunar Lake SOCs & also coming to discrete GPUs in the form of Arc Battlemage. These GPUs are going to offer up to 50% uplifts in performance and feature loads of architectural changes while utilizing a solid software framework established with Alchemist chips.

The work on Intel's Battlemage GPUs began as soon as the design team was finished with the Arc Alchemist architecture. The software-side team had to work on Alchemist for a bit longer as it was the first generation of discrete graphics from Intel. Before this, the company hadn't established a major ecosystem in the DIY segment since most of its architectures were integrated. It took some time but Alchemist's software support did ended getting the "Fine Wine" treatment and we still see good game support such as the recent drivers which added support for two high-profile titles that are launching this month.

With that said, all eyes are now on Arc Battlemage, bolstered by the Xe2 graphics architecture and offering increased performance and efficiency than the past generation. TAP states that Xe2-based Battlemage GPUs will be larger and bigger configurations than their integrated offerings on Lunar Lake SOCs.

These discrete GPUs will also feature faster memory subsystems and bigger caches & that's something to expect since discrete GPUs are less power constrained, leading to different clocks and power envelopes. We won't go into specs in this post since this is more about how the next-gen Battlemage GPUs are processing towards launch but you can still read the latest specs in this post.

It's a scalable architecture. So this Xe2 architecture is obviously the basis of our graphics for Lunar Lake, which is integrated, but it is also going into our Battlemage next-generation discrete graphics. So Battlemage is gonna be a larger, bigger configuration with faster memory subsystems & bigger caches, and all the rest of it, and maybe even different clocks and different power envelopes but the fundamental building block, that Xe2 core, is going to be the same.

Xe core from generation to generation is gonna improve primarily on perf per watt and pref per area. And those two characteristics drive both our better performance for integrated when you're power-constrained and better performance for discrete when you're less power-constrained but more like how big a chip can I build.

So our engineers have been very, very busy improving over our Arc GPU to where we are now ready to take our second crack with Battlemage.

Thomas A. Petersen aka TAP (Intel Technology - Talking Tech)

From what we know, the Intel Xe2 GPU architecture has made a lot of changes to achieve higher utilization of the cores, streamline the work distribution, and achieve less software overhead. The architecture also incorporates 2nd Gen Arc Ray Tracing Units, has deeper and bigger caches, new AI instruction support such as FP16 and INT8 plus new media and display engines. Do check out our deep dive for a more in-depth look at the Xe2 GPU core.

Intel ended the talk by saying that their engineers have been super busy improving their Arc GPUs to where they are now and they are ready to take their second crack with Battlemage. This sounds like Intel is very confident with its Xe2 architecture, especially Arc Battlemage and well this should get us all excited as Intel has a lot of potential with its Arc discrete graphics family and Xe GPUs.

Intel delivered great value with its Arc A-series graphics cards, offered better ray tracing capabilities than AMD's Radeon GPUs, and XeSS, despite lacking frame-gen support, comes out on par with DLSS in a vast majority of comparisons. Surely, Intel doesn't have the ultra-enthusiast or high-end gaming card that one might have hoped for but tackling the mainstream market is still a good start as that makes up the majority of the PC gaming segment. Once Intel has a grip on this market, it can start focusing on higher-end solutions. Intel is expected to introduce Arc Battlemage graphics cards later this year but we should give them all the time they need to make the launch perfect for the gaming community.