There is a fair amount of uncertainty surrounding the arrival date of dedicated graphics cards built around the new Intel Arc Battlemage GPU architecture. While this architecture shows great promise within Lunar Lake and for mobile use, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to break the bank in our PCs. But a leak from Geekbench gives us a little more insight into the potential of these next GPUs. The version evaluated is the Battlemage G21, which has 20 Xe2 cores, the equivalent of 160 computing units (CU). In this test, it runs at a speed of 2.85 GHz. Equipped with 12 GB of VRAM, this GPU is positioned in the mid-range market segment, where the competition is obviously the toughest.
So be warned, for the moment there’s nothing to jump up and down about. This Intel Arc Battlemage G21 card obtained results in the Geekbench 6 OpenCL test, scoring 97,943 points. This performance is comparable to that of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4060. But be warned: we’ve known all along that Intel hasn’t optimised its GPUs for the OpenCL API. We can therefore objectively expect much better performance in games using the DirectX 12 or Vulkan APIs.
When will Intel Battlemage cards arrive?
The real question we need to ask is clearly Intel’s planned release date. Several rumours continue to point to the last quarter of 2024. But those who are familiar with Intel calendars know that this potentially means 31/12/2024… This question of date is crucial, however, as it gives us an idea of where Intel is on its path of development and optimisation of its drivers. We’ve seen that the Blues have been able to dramatically boost the performance of previous generations over the months.
