1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,000 Intel has gone through a bit of a rough patch recently. 2 00:00:03,000 --> 00:00:09,200 One's so bad, maybe we should be calling it a rough mile. Degradation found in their 13th and 14th gen processors 3 00:00:09,200 --> 00:00:12,800 was bad enough. Then there were the mass layoffs and belt tightening. 4 00:00:12,800 --> 00:00:15,920 Then they hoped that the Core Ultra 200 series, 5 00:00:15,920 --> 00:00:21,120 codenamed Aerolake, would make a splash. But unfortunately, despite some interesting changes 6 00:00:21,120 --> 00:00:24,600 and impressive efficiency gains, it was more of a belly flop. 7 00:00:24,600 --> 00:00:28,280 So today they made two major announcements. 8 00:00:28,280 --> 00:00:31,360 Their CEO is out, like what? 9 00:00:31,360 --> 00:00:36,640 And also their Arc desktop GPUs are finally getting a follow up. 10 00:00:36,640 --> 00:00:40,040 To say then that they need Arc Battlemage to be a win 11 00:00:40,040 --> 00:00:44,720 would be a gross understatement. But with the announcements made today, 12 00:00:44,720 --> 00:00:48,280 I am cautiously optimistic. If the numbers are to be believed, 13 00:00:48,280 --> 00:00:51,320 it is looking great for budget gamers. 14 00:00:51,320 --> 00:00:56,320 But if this is yet another failure, I think 2024 could go down 15 00:00:56,320 --> 00:00:59,760 as the single worst year in Intel's existence. 16 00:00:59,760 --> 00:01:05,080 So I thought it was only fitting then that this segue, this one that I'm bragging out right now, 17 00:01:05,080 --> 00:01:08,560 should be remembered as the worst regged segue, 18 00:01:08,560 --> 00:01:13,240 reg, Black Friday might've just passed, ever on this channel. 19 00:01:13,240 --> 00:01:25,640 Editor cut. Thank you. There's a lot of ground for us to cover, 20 00:01:25,640 --> 00:01:30,240 but in a nutshell, you'll find nuts. And in this video, you'll find mostly a recap 21 00:01:30,240 --> 00:01:33,480 of the Battlemage announcement. Intel has confirmed that we are getting 22 00:01:33,480 --> 00:01:37,040 two new graphics cards, the B580 in mid-December 23 00:01:37,040 --> 00:01:40,360 and the B570 about a month later in mid-January. 24 00:01:40,360 --> 00:01:45,160 More on the architectural and software improvements in a bit, but these cards are 12 gig 25 00:01:45,160 --> 00:01:48,800 and 10 gig cards respectively, meaning that you should be very comfortable 26 00:01:48,800 --> 00:01:51,960 gaming at 1080p. And Intel is even going as far as to say 27 00:01:51,960 --> 00:01:56,640 that the B580 could be the heart of a 1440p gaming machine 28 00:01:56,640 --> 00:02:01,320 and all of this for less money than NVIDIA's RTX 4060, 29 00:02:01,320 --> 00:02:06,040 which only has eight gigs of VRAM and is marketed as a 1080p card. 30 00:02:06,040 --> 00:02:09,840 The pricing, I gotta say, it looks great, 31 00:02:09,840 --> 00:02:14,480 but you don't have to look far for the motivation for this hyper-aggressive pricing. 32 00:02:14,480 --> 00:02:17,600 ARC Alchemist has barely even registered 33 00:02:17,600 --> 00:02:21,720 on the Steam hardware survey, it's been out for two long years. 34 00:02:21,720 --> 00:02:26,240 So what has changed then to give this new card a chance to compete? 35 00:02:26,240 --> 00:02:30,280 Well, kind of everything. We first met Battle Mage alongside Intel's 36 00:02:30,280 --> 00:02:35,200 Lunar Lake mobile platform earlier this year. The big focus, efficiency. 37 00:02:35,200 --> 00:02:39,280 Their previous XE-based graphics cards required massive amounts of power 38 00:02:39,280 --> 00:02:42,720 and large silicon dies for meager performance. 39 00:02:42,720 --> 00:02:47,400 And their changes focus on improving core utilization, enabling smarter work distribution 40 00:02:47,400 --> 00:02:50,440 between those cores and reducing software overhead. 41 00:02:50,440 --> 00:02:53,800 They've made vast improvements to pretty much every part of the pipeline. 42 00:02:53,800 --> 00:02:57,800 Improved vertex fetching, mesh shading, out of order sampling, blending throughput, 43 00:02:57,800 --> 00:03:02,760 and many more terms that, quite honestly, I don't expect the average gamer to care about, 44 00:03:02,760 --> 00:03:07,560 but what you might care about is ray tracing. Each ray tracing unit is larger 45 00:03:07,560 --> 00:03:12,760 and can now handle 1.5x or two times more calculations further improving 46 00:03:12,760 --> 00:03:16,600 the already decent RT performance of XE graphics. 47 00:03:16,600 --> 00:03:20,240 And thanks to the B580's 12 gigs of GDDR6, 48 00:03:20,280 --> 00:03:25,160 not 6x, sadly, you are less likely to find your ray tracing performance bottlenecked 49 00:03:25,160 --> 00:03:28,640 with Intel claiming a 64% frame rate improvement 50 00:03:28,640 --> 00:03:32,440 over the RTX 4060 in one cherry-picked example 51 00:03:32,440 --> 00:03:35,720 where the B580 still runs below 60 frames per second, 52 00:03:35,720 --> 00:03:42,160 making that argument pretty questionable lab. But AI, XE Matrix extensions, 53 00:03:42,160 --> 00:03:47,000 which can be described kind of as the tensor cores of Intel GPUs are specifically designed 54 00:03:47,000 --> 00:03:51,200 to maximize performance with the matrix math that is typical of AI workloads. 55 00:03:51,200 --> 00:03:56,440 And they got some nice juice here. XMX was already pretty impressive, 56 00:03:56,440 --> 00:04:01,880 albeit under-supported on their server hardware. But here we get upgrades to support more data types 57 00:04:01,880 --> 00:04:05,240 and we get improved clock speeds, which could be a huge boon for people 58 00:04:05,240 --> 00:04:09,480 who are interested in running local models on the cheap. Intel is so confident in this 59 00:04:09,480 --> 00:04:13,200 that they're providing a front end for generating your own AI images. 60 00:04:13,200 --> 00:04:15,800 Maybe they could use it to generate one like this. 61 00:04:16,920 --> 00:04:20,080 I kid, I kid. All of these improvements and features 62 00:04:20,080 --> 00:04:24,040 are coming on a card that will draw just 8.5% more power 63 00:04:24,040 --> 00:04:28,400 than its namesake predecessor. It's still a lot more power than the RTX 4060, 64 00:04:28,400 --> 00:04:32,320 but is an impressive improvement in performance per watt nonetheless. 65 00:04:32,320 --> 00:04:36,880 But we always gotta keep in mind, these results are cherry-picked samples from Intel. 66 00:04:36,880 --> 00:04:40,560 So as always, I would encourage you guys to wait for our full review. 67 00:04:40,560 --> 00:04:46,920 Speaking of sampling, super sampling. Launching alongside this new discrete card is XCSS2, 68 00:04:46,920 --> 00:04:50,400 which is Team Blue's answer to DLSS3 plus Framegen. 69 00:04:50,400 --> 00:04:55,080 It packs a suite of AI-enhanced features. Super sampling to improve performance 70 00:04:55,080 --> 00:05:00,200 by rendering the game at a lower resolution, then using AI to upscale it to your display, 71 00:05:00,200 --> 00:05:05,000 combined with AI-powered frame generation that will add fake frames based on both 72 00:05:05,000 --> 00:05:08,400 in-engine vector information and optical flow information. 73 00:05:08,400 --> 00:05:12,800 To deal with the added latency of trying to add fake frames, a latency reduction solution 74 00:05:12,800 --> 00:05:16,400 that is plainly titled XC low latency until claims we can expect 75 00:05:16,400 --> 00:05:19,520 a 45% latency reduction over native rendering. 76 00:05:19,520 --> 00:05:24,120 Furthermore, they're bringing XCSS support to Vulkan and DirectX 11, allowing developers 77 00:05:24,120 --> 00:05:27,440 to more easily implement the tech in existing and future games. 78 00:05:27,440 --> 00:05:33,600 Sounds promising, but naturally, all of the caveats around the image quality of DLSS and FSR 79 00:05:33,600 --> 00:05:38,000 still apply here. Tell me, see it, maybe it's perfect, but I doubt it. 80 00:05:38,000 --> 00:05:42,920 But what about the price? I keep saying it's good, but I haven't said what it is. 81 00:05:42,920 --> 00:05:47,440 Well, you're gonna have to wait for our review to see where this card actually lands 82 00:05:47,440 --> 00:05:50,760 when it comes to 1080p and 1440p performance. 83 00:05:50,760 --> 00:05:55,320 But what we know now is at $249. 84 00:05:55,320 --> 00:05:58,760 I am, well, I'm extremely excited. 85 00:05:58,760 --> 00:06:02,320 Both of the incumbent players have treated the budget gaming segment 86 00:06:02,320 --> 00:06:05,440 like it isn't even worth their time and attention. 87 00:06:05,440 --> 00:06:11,480 But Intel looks dead set to bring back the capable $500 gaming box. 88 00:06:11,600 --> 00:06:14,840 And this is the best outcome that I could have hoped for 89 00:06:14,840 --> 00:06:20,440 back when they threw their hat in the ring. Their LTT hat pro, lttstore.com. 90 00:06:20,440 --> 00:06:24,040 Of course, we should be taking all of this with a grain of salt, so big you could choke on it. 91 00:06:24,040 --> 00:06:27,920 But what Intel is claiming is 26% average uplift 92 00:06:27,920 --> 00:06:32,840 in raster performance per dollar over the RX7600 at 1440p Ultra, 93 00:06:32,840 --> 00:06:37,960 which is across 47 games on a card that is $20 cheaper at MSRP. 94 00:06:37,960 --> 00:06:41,920 And then if we look at Ray Tracing, which is one of Team Red's biggest weak points 95 00:06:41,920 --> 00:06:47,200 when compared to NVIDIA, Team Blue comes out 37 points ahead of that same card. 96 00:06:47,200 --> 00:06:53,160 There's less data points here with only nine games tested, but that is still very hopefully impressive. 97 00:06:53,160 --> 00:06:58,160 And at $299, the RTX 4060 is allegedly getting slaughtered 98 00:06:59,000 --> 00:07:03,960 by Intel's new B580. That NVIDIA card costs about 20% more 99 00:07:03,960 --> 00:07:08,880 while delivering allegedly 24% less raster performance 100 00:07:08,880 --> 00:07:12,200 per dollar and 20% less Ray Tracing performance 101 00:07:12,200 --> 00:07:16,760 per dollar at 1440p. So it looks like while the CPU team at Intel 102 00:07:16,760 --> 00:07:23,600 was busy trying to do something great, the GPU division may have been busy succeeding, allegedly. 103 00:07:23,600 --> 00:07:27,560 I can't wait to start testing these cards and finding out where they actually land 104 00:07:27,560 --> 00:07:31,040 both against the competition and against themselves. 105 00:07:31,040 --> 00:07:34,880 This card should crush it in just about every way. 106 00:07:34,880 --> 00:07:40,560 Yes, the memory bus width is substantially lower, but we've got a lot more VRAM and much higher clock speeds 107 00:07:40,560 --> 00:07:45,800 to help make 1440p gaming possible. They're also launching alongside years of groundwork 108 00:07:45,800 --> 00:07:48,960 that was laid by the driver team that took the original arc cards 109 00:07:48,960 --> 00:07:54,860 from the stuttery mess at launch to basically playable across the majority of PC games. 110 00:07:54,860 --> 00:07:58,560 Now, when we were discussing the leaks and the battle mage launch internally, 111 00:07:58,560 --> 00:08:04,120 we all agreed that this thing needed to be no more than $250 and at minimum, 112 00:08:04,120 --> 00:08:07,440 it had to be on par with an RTX 4060 for performance, 113 00:08:07,440 --> 00:08:11,240 for it to even matter. Anything more expensive or less performant 114 00:08:11,240 --> 00:08:15,680 and they would have shot themselves in the foot moments before the race even began. 115 00:08:15,680 --> 00:08:19,280 Well, Intel, battle mage and XC2 graphics, 116 00:08:19,280 --> 00:08:22,800 they might be a little late to the party, but if these slides are to be believed, 117 00:08:22,800 --> 00:08:27,840 they were just busy stopping for more beverages and guests so they could keep the party going. 118 00:08:27,840 --> 00:08:31,000 Their timing, also kind of good in my opinion. 119 00:08:31,000 --> 00:08:37,040 It could be months before we see something like an RTX 5060 from NVIDIA and an RX 8600 120 00:08:37,240 --> 00:08:41,440 or whatever's next from AMD. Now, there's absolutely no telling how much better they might be, 121 00:08:41,440 --> 00:08:44,680 but even a 20% improvement at the same price 122 00:08:44,680 --> 00:08:49,400 could still keep Intel on top of that lowest rung on the ladder. 123 00:08:49,400 --> 00:08:53,400 So the way that I see it, if we have to sacrifice Pat Gelsinger 124 00:08:53,400 --> 00:08:58,040 to summon our dark magician, well then that's just the heart of the cards. 125 00:08:58,040 --> 00:09:03,160 Now I summon Pot of Greed, which lets me give you three segues to our sponsor. 126 00:09:03,160 --> 00:09:06,600 Thanks for watching. If you guys liked this video, go check out our Intel Arc livestream 127 00:09:06,680 --> 00:09:10,520 back when they first launched. It's, um, has improved a lot.