Intel’s Arc series of graphics cards have been met with hesitation, then excitement, as they’ve offered better value than both Nvidia and AMD at their respective price points. But the last new consumer card we saw was the second-gen Arc B580 way back in December, and the B570 is the only other one in the series. Where are the new cards? According to a new Linux driver, they’re…somewhere.
A Twitter/X user going by @LasseKrkkinen spotted four new hardware identifiers in the latest round of Linux driver updates for Arc graphics cards. According to Tom’s Hardware, the “BMG” family label indicates that these are new members of the second-gen Battlemage line, which has so far only seen mid-range entries.
There’s no way to positively associate these new IDs with new graphics cards beyond that, or even guess when or if they’ll come to market. Let me stress that again: Just because hardware is identified in documentation doesn’t mean that it’ll go through the long process of making it to a retail product launch. But the hope for cash-strapped PC gamers is that at least one of them is the Arc B770, a follow-up to the original Arc A770, and which would presumably compete with Nvidia’s RTX 5060 and the AMD’s Radeon RX 9060. (The others are likely the business-focused Arc Pro variants announced during Computex last week.)
The RTX 5060 costs $299 and comes with a disappointing 8GB of video memory — if Intel could beat it in either respect, it would get the attention of the market in a serious way. Of course it would also have to compete in terms of performance, too. C’mon, Intel, I’m rooting for you…which feels weird to say, but the desktop graphics market has been a duopoly (and more recently, an effective monopoly for Nvidia) for far too long.