There’s yet another leak related to the upcoming Intel Arc Battlemage GPU launch, with the latest information showing a benchmark run on one of the new graphics cards. As well as seemingly confirming some specs of the new GPU, the test run’s score also makes for surprising reading.
Intel Arc Battlemage is the second generation range of Intel Arc GPUs, following the launch of the Intel Arc Alchemist range back in 2022. As we found in our Intel Arc A770 review, these first-gen GPUs were reasonably capable but lacked driver support at launch such that they didn’t do enough to earn a spot on our best graphics card guide. With Battlemage, the hope is that Intel will have cranked its GPU performance up a notch, and have an even stronger contender to take on AMD and Nvidia’s next generation of GPUs.
Early signs aren’t overly positive, though, based on this new benchmark leak. The test run has appeared on the Geekbench website and it shows that one of the new Battlemage GPUs – if it is indeed one of those chips – achieves an OpenCL benchmark score of just 78,743, which is really low.
For comparison, its Arc A770 card achieves 107,471 in the same test, while the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 manages a score of 101,783, according to Geekbench’s online test run browser. Meanwhile, cards with scores in the same ballpark as this new mystery GPU include the laptop variant of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 and the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, both of which are cards over four years old.
The big caveat here, though, is that not only is this leaked GPU likely to be an entry-level variant of the new Battlemage lineup, but by the nature of it being an early benchmark, driver support for the card could be hugely unoptimized as yet. We saw with the Arc A770, at launch this GPU had dreadful consistency of performance, but over the years its compatibility and performance have improved enormously. It’s perhaps unlikely this GPU’s score will double just thanks to a new driver but it could increase significantly.
As for other details revealed in this leak, the entry says that it was run on a GPU with an Intel Xe graphics device containing 160 compute units running at 2,850MHz and with 11.6GB of graphics memory. There’s not a lot we can draw from the mention of 160 compute units, as the way these components are counted can change significantly from architecture to architecture.
However, we can draw some other conclusions. There have recently been widespread leaks regarding new Intel B580 graphics cards, suggesting these will be the first Battlemage GPUs, and that the Intel Arc B580 launch date will be before the end of this year. As such, it’s a reasonable assumption that this leak also corresponds to this range of GPUs.
The expectation, based on these previous leaks, is that the B580 will be the replacement for the A580, which is the entry-level alternative to the A770. That card scores 89,699 in Geekbench 6, again showing just how off the pace this early benchmark leak is compared to a final product.
The A580 also runs at 1,700MHz and is equipped with 8GB of VRAM, so the 2,850MHz clock speed and 11.6GB (effectively 12GB) memory shown in this leak suggests a decent upgrade to these aspects of the new Intel graphics cards. Similar specs have also been shown in a recent leak of ASRock Arc B580 graphics cards on Amazon, with the top model having a 2,830MHz clock speed and 12GB of VRAM.
If those release rumors are true, we won’t have very long at all to wait for the official announcement of Intel’s new GPUs, and following that it will be just a week into the new year when we also expect to see the arrival of the AMD Radeon 8000 series and Nvidia RTX 5000 series, with both expected to be launched at the CES 2025 trade show in January.