The presumed Battlemage engineering samples suggests that Intel's Arc GPUs for the mid-range are still in good shape.

There's a lot of interest in discrete graphics cards too. Recent shipping data research indicates that graphics cards are gaining in popularity. Intel Battlemage would then be able to enter a market that is very receptive.

Geekbench benchmarks (via Wccftech), show what is almost certain to be a Battlemage Engineering sample, hitting performance levels between an RTX 3960 and RTX 4960. This sample has an astonishing 2,850 MHz clock, 160 Xe vector engines (XVEs), as well as 20 Xe cores.

The benchmark lists the GPU ID as "8086 E20B". Wccftech points out that this device ID was previously seen in Linux drivers under the codename "G21". It's likely that this is a Battlemage GPU result.

Intel's next generation Battlemage discrete GPUs are now available and feature the same Xe2 architecture found in the latest Lunar Lake processors. We know from testing Lunar Lake, that Xe2 graphics offer a significant improvement in gaming performance compared to Xe graphics found in Meteor Lake Laptops. So we can expect Battlemage to deliver similar improvements pound for pound.

Lunar Lake looksphenomenal on the graphics front. In our testing, we found that Time Spy GPU scores were 30% higher than first-gen graphics. It's reasonable to be excited by the prospect of this architecture making its way into our rigs as discrete form.

What's up with this apparent Battlemage GPU scoring 97,943? This is a lot less that the previous-gen Intel Arc A770. When comparing GPU benchmarks of systems with similar specs as the one that was running Battlemage, an RTX3060 scores around 93,000 and an RX7700 XT scores around 133,000.

There are two possible answers to this question. This is an engineering sample. While we hope to see Battlemage GPUs on the market in the next few months, this benchmark is not a final or near-final engineering sample. Final samples could perform better when they are optimised, and, y'know finalised.

Second, 20 Xe cores is not a lot and is much less than the previous-generation Intel Arc graphics card. For comparison, the A770 features 32 Xe cores and the A750 28.

A Geekbench score of 94k isn't bad, especially for an engineering sample. If this is indeed Battlemage then it would perform or at leastmarginally higher than the A750, despite having eight less Xe cores. This is a nice architectural upgrade from one generation to the next.

We'll still expect higher-end graphics cards down the road if such a 20-core, 12-GB VRAM Battlemage card launches. Previous rumours suggested that we would see a 32-core card. This, combined with the possible gen-on -gen improvement could result in a graphics card that is even better than what previous rumours predicted.

To make maths simple, an engineering sample with 30 cores would be 50% faster than the 20-core. This would give a score of 147k which is higher than an RX7700 XT, and close to the RTX4070 territory. This is exactly what we hoped and anticipated Battlemage to target.

The mid-range segment will be the one that most gamers are looking at. We can also hope to see this number rise as engineering samples improve, and Battlemage nears its release. Lunar Lake has given us a hint of excitement.