Intel has gone through a bit of a rough patch recently.
One's 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,
codenamed Aerolake, 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 follow up.
To say then that they need Arc Battlemage 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 bragging out right now,
should be remembered as the worst regged segue,
reg, Black Friday might've just passed, ever on this channel.
Editor cut. Thank you. 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 Battlemage 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 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 4060,
which only has eight gigs of VRAM and is marketed as a 1080p card.
The pricing, I gotta 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, 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 Battle 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 XE graphics.
And thanks to the B580's 12 gigs of GDDR6,
not 6x, sadly, you are less likely to find your ray tracing performance bottlenecked
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 lab. But AI, XE 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,
albeit 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 boon 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 gotta 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 discrete card is XCSS2,
which is Team Blue's answer to DLSS3 plus Framegen.
It packs a suite 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 XC low latency until claims we can expect
a 45% latency reduction over native rendering.
Furthermore, they're bringing XCSS support to Vulkan and DirectX 11, 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. Tell me, 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 gonna 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 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, lttstore.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 RX7600 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 Ray 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 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 8600
or whatever's 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, if we have to sacrifice Pat Gelsinger
to summon our dark magician, well then that's just the heart of the cards.
Now I summon Pot of Greed, which lets me give you three segues to our sponsor.
Thanks for watching. If you guys liked this video, go check out our Intel Arc livestream
back when they first launched. It's, um, has improved a lot.