Intel Announces Arc B-Series “Battlemage” Discrete Graphics With Linux Support

Succeeding the Intel Arc Graphics discrete graphics cards that launched two years ago as the DG2/Alchemist series, the next-gen Battlemage graphics cards are being announced today. The embargo lifts today on the new Intel Arc B-Series graphics cards with initial availability next week. Like the prior generation Intel graphics and as discussed already in many Phoronix articles, Battlemage is still treated to fully open-source graphics driver support on Linux.

Battlemage makes use of Xe2 graphics, similar to the recent integrated graphics with Lunar Lake.

There’s a lot of nice improvements over the two-year old Alchemist graphics.

For the initial Battlemage graphics is the BMG-G21 GPU with 20 Xe cores, 160 XMX engines, 20 ray-tracing units, 192-bit GDDR6 video memory interface, and other upgrades. Intel is promoting up to a 70% improvement in performance per Xe core and up to a 50% performance per Watt improvement.

Being announced today are the Arc Graphics B580 and B570 graphics cards. The Arc B580 boasts the full 20 Xe cores, 2670MHz graphics clock, 12GB of GDDR6 video memory, and 190 Watt total board power rating. The Arc B570 meanwhile has 18 Xe cores, 2500MHz graphics clock, 10GB of GDDR6 video memory, and rated for 150 Watt board power. While the prior generation had a flagship Arc A770 model, no “Arc B750” or “Arc B770” is being announced today or any other higher-tier part past the Arc B500 series. This is a mid-range focused card primarily for 1440p gaming and less.

These new Battlemage graphics cards function on a PCIe 4.0 x8 interface and require one 8-pin PCI Express power connector. AV1, HEVC, AVC, VP9, and XAVC-H hardware acceleration is available but no VVC as found with Lunar Lake.

Intel with their Windows benchmarks are promoting the Arc B580 as being 24% faster than the Intel Arc A750. Or against the NVIDIA competition they are promoting as 10% faster than the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060, again under Windows.

The Intel Arc B580 will be shipping next week for $249+ USD. The Arc B570 will be shipping 16 January at $219+ USD.

Today’s announcement just span the Intel Battlemage details. The review embargo has not yet passed and thus are not able to share any performance details or any new Linux details on the Intel Arc B580/B570 support. So the value add of Phoronix around the Linux performance and support details will come later… But needless to say, as has been covered in many Phoronix articles Intel has spent months already working on the open-source and upstream-oriented Linux support from the Xe kernel driver to the Mesa Iris OpenGL and ANV Vulkan drivers. Plus the Intel Compute Runtime stack for OpenCL and Level Zero. Those can check out the prior Battlemage coverage around all the upstream support.

So for launch day you can expect upstream support with the stable Linux 6.12 kernel and latest Mesa graphics drivers as already covered in prior Phoronix articles on Mesa/kernel news. Beyond that you’ll need to wait to hear all the performance details and more. But at this stage you can expect that I wouldn’t have been invited to the Battlemage review briefings if the Linux support was in bad shape and struggling compared to Windows, etc. So stay tuned to learn more soon about Intel Arc B580 graphics on Linux.

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