Intel Arc Battlemage GPUs to launch before Black Friday, says report

The arrival of Intel’s second generation of proper, bonafide discrete graphics cards has been a long and drawn out process. However, we’re finally getting ever closer to the Intel Battlemage release date, it would seem, as the latest rumors suggest cards will be available to buy in time for this coming holiday season.

Yes, Black Friday 2024 may still be a few months away, but you’ll be surprised how quickly the time will fly. And when it does arrive we could actually have a brand new Intel GPU sitting proud on our best graphics card guide, if Intel Battlemage does actually turn out to be any good.

The latest Intel Battlemage rumor comes via German tech site, ComputerBase, which claims to have overheard discussions among Intel partners regarding the product’s launch window. These discussions were taking place at Embedded World, a trade show in Germany at which Intel had just launched six new Arc graphics cards aimed at the edge and embedded computing markets – just like Intel’s new desktop Meteor Lake CPUs.

Specifically, ComputerBase says that “[Intel] is targeting autumn and definitely wants to take advantage of the strong sales season, which is experiencing its first peak with Black Friday.” The site goes on to point out that this time period “fits with Intel’s already officially stated schedule.”

It’s no great surprise that Intel would want to have products available for the biggest shopping day of the year, especially as we would also expect at least some competing GPUs from AMD and Nvidia to have launched by this time. For Intel not to have an updated roster of cards to compete with the likes of the RTX 5090 or Radeon RX 8900 XTX would be a misstep.

This also all ties in with recent news that Battlemage GPUs have already started shipping out to graphics card partners. There hasbn’t been much speculation about the performance of these Xe2-HPG GPUs yet, although some of the numbers from leaked Battlemage benchmarks were lower than expected.

We’re sure to find out more soon, with the Computex 2024 trade show in Taiwan likely to be a venue for several big CPU and GPU announcements from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia. For now, though, check out our new RTX 4080 Super review, where we benchmark Nvidia’s new high-end gaming GPU.