Intel has gone through a bit of a rough patch recently one so bad maybe we
should be calling it a rough mile degradation found in their 13th and 14th
gen processors was bad enough then there were the mass layoffs and belt
tightening then they hoped that the core Ultra 200 series code Nam Arrow Lake
would make a splash but unfortunately despite some interesting changes and
impressive efficiency gains it was more of a belly flop so today they made two
major announcements their CEO is out
like what and also their Arc desktop
gpus are finally getting a followup to
say then that they need arc battle mage to be a win would be a gross
understatement but with the announcements made today I am cautiously
optimistic if the numbers are to be believed it is looking great for Budget
Gamers but if this is yet another failure I think 2024 could go down as
the single worst year in Intel's existence so I thought it was only
fitting then that this segue this one that I'm dragging out right now should
be remembered as the worst Ridge segue
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there's a lot of ground for us to cover but in a nutshell you'll find nuts and
in this video you'll find mostly a recap of the battle mage announcement Intel
has confirmed that we are getting two new graphics cards the b580 in mid
December and the b570 about a month later in mid January more on the
architectural and software improvements in a bit but these cards are 12 gig and
10 gig cards respectively meaning that you should be very comfortable gaming at
1080P and Intel is even going as as far as to say that the b580 could be the
heart of a 1440p gaming machine and all
of this for less money than NVIDIA's RTX
460 which only has 8 gigs of vram and is
marketed as a 1080p card the pricing I
got to say it looks great but you don't
have to look far for the motivation for this hyper aggressive pricing Arc
Alchemist has barely even registered on the steam Hardware survey and it's been
out for two long years so what has
changed then to give this new card a chance to compete well kind of
everything we first met battl Mage alongside Intel's lunar lake mobile
platform earlier this year the big Focus efficiency their previous XE based
graphics cards required massive amounts of power and large silicon dies for
meager performance and their changes focus on improving core utilization
enabling smarter work distribution between those cores and reducing
software overhead they've made vast improvements to pretty much every part
of the pipeline improved vertex fetching mesh shading out of order sampling
blending throughput and many more terms that quite honestly I don't expect the
average gamer to care about but what you might care about is Ray tracing each Ray
tracing unit is larger and can now handle 1.5x or two times more
calculations further improving the already decent RT performance of XC
graphics and thanks to the b580 12 gigs
of GDDR 6 not 6x sadly you are less
likely to find your rate tracing performance bottleneck with Intel claiming a 64% frame rate improvement
over the RTX 4060 in one cherry-picked
example where the b580 still runs below 60 frames per second making that
argument pretty questionable but but AI
XY Matrix extensions which can be described kind of as the tensor cores of
Intel gpus are specifically designed to maximize performance with the Matrix
math that is typical of AI workloads and they got some nice juice here xmx was
already pretty impressive albe it under supported on their server Hardware but
here we get upgrades to support more data types and we get improved clock
speeds which could be a huge Boom for people who are interested in running
local models on the cheap Intel is so confident in this that they're providing
a front end for generating your own AI images maybe they could use it to
generate one like this I kid I kid all
of these improvements and features are coming on a card that will draw just
8.5% more power than its namesake predecessor it's still a lot more power
than the RTX 4060 but is an impressive Improvement in performance per watt
nonetheless but we always got to keep in mind these results are cherry-picked
samples from Intel so as always I would encourage you guys to wait for our full
review speaking of sampling super sampling launching alongside this new
discret card is xcs2 which is team Blue's answer to dlss 3 plus frame gen
it packs a sweet of AI enhanced features super sampling to improve performance by
rendering the game at a lower resolution then using AI to upscale it to your
display combined with AI powered frame generation that will add fake frames
based on both in-engine Vector information and Optical flow information
to deal with the added latency of trying to add fake frames a latency reduction
solution that is plainly titled XE low latency Intel claims we can expect a 45%
latency reduction over native rendering furthermore they're bringing xcss
support to Vulcan and direct X11 allowing developers to more easily
implement the tech in existing and future games sounds promising but
naturally all of the caveats around the image quality of dlss and FSR still
apply here until we see it maybe it's perfect but I doubt it but what about
the price I keep saying it's good but I haven't said what it is well you're
going to have to wait for our review to see where this card actually lands when
it comes to 1080P and 1440p performance
but what we know now is at
$249 I am well I'm extremely excited
both of the incumbent players have treated the budget gaming segment like
it isn't even worth their time and attention but Intel looks dead set to
bring back the like the capable $500
gaming box and this is the best outcome
that I could have hoped for back when they threw their hat in the ring their
LTT hat Pro LTT Store.com of course we
should be taking all of this with a grain of salt so big you could choke on it but what Intel is claiming is 26%
average uplift in raster performance per dollar over the RX 7600 at 1440p Ultra
which is across 47 games on a card that is $20 cheaper at MSRP and then if we
look at Ray tracing which is one of Team Red's biggest weak points when compared
to NVIDIA team blue comes out 37 points
ahead of that same card there's less data points here with only nine games
tested but that is still very hopefully
impressive and at 299 the RTX 4060 is
allegedly getting slaughtered by Intel's new b580 that NVIDIA card costs about
20% more while delivering allegedly 24%
less raster performance per dollar and 20% less raate tracing performance per
dollar at 1440p so it looks like while the CPU
team at Intel was busy trying to do something great the GPU division may
have been busy succeeding allegedly I
can't wait to start testing these cards and finding out where they actually land
both against the competition and against themselves this card should crush it in
just about every way yes the memory bus
width is substantially lower but we've got a lot more vram and much higher
clock speeds to help make 1440p gaming possible they're also launching
alongside years of groundwork that was laid by the driver team that took the
original Arc cards from the stuttery mess at launch to basically playable
across the majority of PC games now when we were discussing the leaks and the
battle mage launch internally we all agreed that this thing needed to be no
more than $250 and at minimum it had to
be on par with an RTX 4060 for performance for it to even matter
anything more expensive or less performant and they would have shot
themselves in the foot moments before the race even began well Intel battle
mage and xc2 Graphics they might be a little late to the party but but if
these slides are to be believed they were just busy stopping for more
Beverages and guests so they could keep the party going their timing also kind
of good in my opinion it could be months before we see something like an RTX 5060
from NVIDIA and an RX 88600 or whatever is next from AMD now there's absolutely
no telling how much better they might be but even a 20% Improvement at the same
price could still keep Intel on top of that lowest rung on the ladder so the
way that I see it it if we have to sacrifice Pat Ginger to summon our Dark
Magician well then that's just the heart of the cards now I summon pot of greed
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2025 oh God it's 2025 thanks for
watching if you guys like this video go check out our Intel Arc live stream back
when they first launched it um has improved a lot