Presumed Battlemage engineering sample suggests there's some hope for Intel's next-gen Arc GPUs in the mid-range

Talk might revolve around AMD Strix Point and Intel Lunar Lake chips of late, but there's plenty of hunger for discrete graphics cards, too. In fact, recent shipping data research points towards increasing interest in graphics cards compared to previously. In which case, Intel Battlemage could enter a very receptive market.

New Geekbench benchmark results (via Wccftech) show what is almost certainly a Battlemage engineering sample hitting performance levels somewhere between an RTX 3060 and RTX 4060. This sample, it seems, has 11.6 GB VRAM, an extraordinary 2,850 MHz clock speed, 160 Xe Vector Engines (XVEs), and presumably 20 Xe-cores, given that Xe 2 GPUs have 8 Vector Engines per Xe-core.

The benchmark lists the GPU as «8086:E20B» and Wccftech notes that this device ID has previously cropped up in Linux drivers as a «G21» codenamed GPU. It's quite likely, therefore, that this is in fact a Battlemage GPU benchmark result.

Intel's next-gen Battlemage discrete graphics cards are officially coming, and they boast the same Xe2 graphics architecture as found in the latest Lunar Lake mobile processors. We already know from testing Lunar Lake that Xe2 offers a significant step up in gaming performance over Xe graphics such as is found in Meteor Lake laptops, so we can expect similar pound-for-pound (so to speak) improvements from Battlemage.

And to be quite clear, Lunar Lake is seeming quite phenomenal on the graphics front. Our testing shows, for instance, a 30% increase in Time Spy GPU scores compared to first-gen Xe graphics. Given this, it's plenty reasonable to be excited about the prospect of this architecture finding its way into our rigs in discrete form.

What gives, then, with this apparent Battlemage GPU's 97,943 score? After all, that's a fair whack less than the previous-gen Intel Arc A770 can achieve. Looking at GPU benchmarks in systems with similar specs to that which the apparent Battlemage system was running, an RTX 3060 scores about 93,000, and an RX