Just when you thought you’d better get saving for your new RTX 5000-series graphics card, off the back of an Intel update on it’s GPU plans, tech website Videocardz is claiming Intel is going to release two new Arc-series graphics cards as soon as the middle of December. The Arc Battlemage Xe2 graphics cards will be named the Arc B580 and B570.
Based off previous naming scheme for its first generation Arc models, the fact these are the 5-series suggests they are relatively low end cards, with the previous generation offering Arc 3, 5 and 7 ranges and a recent pricing leak of around $250 seems to confirm that. Interestingly, Intel is supposedly offering the B580 with 12GB memory, which is something equivalently-priced models from AMD and Nvidia don’t do, perhaps handing Intel an advantage.
Videocardz has it’s own source for the information, which also includes an announcement date of December 3rd, while other leaks point at a review and launch embargo of December 12th for Intel’s own Limited Edition model and December 13th for board partners with other designs. It’s fairly clear given the price that Intel is aiming to disrupt the low and mid-range segments of the gaming market, which makes sense given graphics cards such as the RTX 3060, RTX 4060 and RTX 2060 dominate the top five graphics cards in Steam’s Hardware Survey. It’s most definitely where the big sales are.
Intel has timed the launch well, offering potential pre-Christmas new GPU sales, although actual availability is unknown and could well slip till after Christmas. However, given that Nvidia isn’t expected to even announce its RTX 5000 series until early January, Intel could be stealing a march on Nvidia, so long as the graphics cards and drivers are ready of course and we don’t have a repeat of the rushed launch of the Core Ultra 200 series processors that led to stability issues landing in the laps of reviewers.
With Nvidia not having updated its RTX 3050 with a 4000-series model and instead pointing users at the RTX 4060, there’s clearly a gap in the sub $300 market here and it’s this that Intel is aiming for first so while there’s no mention of target performance here, a $250-$350 B580 should be aiming to compete with the RTX 4060 Ti at the very least, with 12GB versus 8GB going in its favor at least.
Intel has faced an up-hill struggle with its Arc graphics cards and large tests in recent months comparing them against competition from AMD and Nvidia still found numerous games where performance was well below par as well as higher than average power consumption. Matching AMD and Nvidia’s relentless driver optimization was never going to be an easy task for Intel, but it has made significant improvement since the launch of the original Arc cards two years ago.
AMD, meanwhile, is expected to launch its Radeon RX 8000-series graphics card in January so the next two months look very interesting for gamers. I’ll be reviewing the new graphics cards when they arrive so follow me here on Forbes using the blue button below, Facebook or YouTube to get the latest news and reviews.
