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

[cutterjohn]

** <yawn> **

ditto, waiting for B780 w/24GB or 32GB... don't care about a really lowish end mid range card, although I won't touch any of these until I see a full gamut of reviews across games and compute, but 12GB nah, pass, that's so 2019...

Driver support OOB 'SHOULD' be better this time around, unless they really f'ed ANV and their windows drivers...

Now to sit and wait on reviews...

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Intel GPUs are working great for me. They have made significant progress with Linux (and Windows) drivers based on my experience with A770 and A580. I would just buy the new B580 for the right price. I hope they improved their power requirements though. Both A770 and A580 use more power than AMD and Nvidia for similar performance.

The Intel specs have the B580 TBP 5W higher than the A580. That isn't horrible if it's meaningfully faster, and at least it's finally a single 8-pin power connector. Even the A770's 2x 8-pin was silly for its performance / TBP.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

i740 was abandoned rather quickly, too. Yet those who bought those cards were still able to enjoy them for a long while.

Things are pretty different > 20 years later. These cards will still render your desktop fine even if Intel gives up on dGPUs. But they will effectively be paperweights for gaming without heavy continued investment in the drivers. Our unfortunate model of game specific driver changes / optimizations necessitates that. If people could trust that Intel was in the dGPU game for the long haul these could sell quite well. The market has been starved of decent (old school) mid-range cards for a long time. I'll probably buy one to mess around with knowing that I might be pissing my money away. I just don't see waves of others doing so without some kind of guarantee that Intel is still going to be making dGPUs for many years to come.

[mrg666]

The Intel specs have the B580 TBP 5W higher than the A580. That isn't horrible if it's meaningfully faster, and at least it's finally a single 8-pin power connector. Even the A770's 2x 8-pin was silly for its performance / TBP.

Even my A580 has two 8 pin connectors. Single connector, and just 5W power increase sound like Intel made good improvement on power requirement. I would not mind power requirement that much for a normal computer, but A580 is in a tiny itx case and additional cable and heat are more limiting there.

One other nice thing about this new generation Intel GPU is that the improvements in drivers will apply to Alchemist GPU s as well. Way to go Intel, thank you!

[Quackdoc]

With the way things are going in the gaming space and the proliferation of train wrecks like EU5, I doubt anyone would want a GPU that's less than a "high mid range" (meaning less than $500). Unless you are fine with using upscalers.

lots of people are, we just care about *gaming* and if the cards give a good value, they will be bought, regardless of what tech is used.

Will there be a 7 series (B770, 16GB VRAM and 256 bit bus width?).

I think we will in the future, but intel getting *something* out for the holiday market is important, and these happen to be the right price range, at least from what I saw when working, to hit the market strong

I'll be getting a B580 for one of my home systems to replace an older 2060 Nvidia card, and I'll let you know how it goes with Arch Linux.
The machine is used for gaming (Hogwarts Academy & the new Sonic Generations games in particular) so it's not meant to be the ultimate gaming card but I will put it through its paces in more than just basic desktop use.

for sure ping me and let me know, I currently have an A380 and it's been rocking solid, looking at an upgrade for my pops hopefully sometime soon

As far as I understood, yes, ReBAR is still required.

Thankfully not an issue for us linux folk

[pong]

Am I like the only one excited for these? I like to not spend ridiculous prices for decent GPU performance

I am sure most all agree that lower priced / better value GPUs are good.

I think it's more questionable what "decent GPU performance" means.

It terms of "it plays games adequately" or "it accelerates computing usefully" one might
argue that discrete GPUs are too often used as a misplaced crutch to avoid making the core
system CPU / memory architecture better at doing those things itself.

These are positioned as what one might reasonably call lower-mid-range DGPUs compared to
what NV/AMD already have and are likely to have in 2025-2026.

Almost all "I'm a {graphics & speed focused gamer|enthusiast|productivity oriented user|content creator}" CPUs have IGPUs and many cores at this point so having the literally same companies (AMD, INTEL) sell you a "enthusiast / gamer / creator" oriented CPU + IGPU motherboard + chipset and then turn around and sell you a lower-mid-range DGPU "because you need more faster processing and graphics!!!" is sort of questionable since if that's the case
then why'd they design the cpu / chipset / motherboard / RAM system just for those target markets and then make it a foregone conclusion that basically every one of their customers in those market segments for which they made the CPU / platform (et. al.) needs a low-mid-range or better DGPU in order to do what they want to do.

They could have, you know, just designed the main computer to compute and do graphics / parallel / memory stuff better given the NN-core CPU and IGPU you just already paid for.

For other "AIML PC" stuff that's relatively modern / serious it's questionable whether a 8 / 12 GB or even 16 GB is a good idea to pin one's hopes on and spend one's acceleration money on considering the main free-to-use ML models which are considered quite good at what consumers could benefit from are already well bigger than that amount of VRAM size and one can't expand VRAM, but one can expand (or at least scale to 32 GBy+) DRAM if they made that possible and higher BW.

[pong]

Will there be a 7 series (B770, 16GB VRAM and 256 bit bus width?).
B580 might have lower performance than A580 on FluidX3D, which depends (like most HPC workloads) on memory bandwidth. The A-series really excelled at it, even surpassing 4070.

A770	A580	B580	4060	4070
560 GB/s	512 GB/s	456 GB/s	272 GB/s	504 GB/s
20 TFLOP/s	12 TFLOP/s	14 TFLOP/s	15 TFLOP/s	15 TFLOP/s

I know this is a niche use, and most here would care about gaming, but I still think it is important.

Yeah agreed -- I was HOPING for something like a B770 / B790 or whatever with more like 32-64 GBy VRAM and some upgrade in VRAM BW vs. A770. That would make a lot more possible just ordinary every day things I personally as a consumer want to do.

[pong]

Intel GPUs are working great for me. They have made significant progress with Linux (and Windows) drivers based on my experience with A770 and A580. I would just buy the new B580 for the right price. I hope they improved their power requirements though. Both A770 and A580 use more power than AMD and Nvidia for similar performance.

Yeah power management has to improve; in fact ust plain (interactive CLI / GUI) management has to improve -- power, fans, clocks, video settings, leds, etc. And linux firmware update.

It's baseline to be able to monitor & control the settings of a DGPU on any platform.

[the-burrito-triangle]

I'm tempted buy one of these new Intel cards. They will have excellent video decoding / encoding and great OpenCL performance, but I hesitate to buy one for gaming as Intel's Vulkan drivers suck major ass. The first gen Xe parts take a giant dump in their pants when running Vulkan games while OpenGL works great with the same settings. D3D9-11 probably works fine on Windows too. D3D12 on Windows I can't say. But Vulkan with Xe on Linux is a sad shit-show. It's almost comical that I can play quite a few games at 4k/60fps with OpenGL on a TigerLake-LP GT2 (96EUs) laptop but if I use Vulkan... 10-20fps. Crazy. (This is with the "platform" and governor both set to "performance" (i.e., "unlimited" power) and disabling Turbo Boost to give the GPU more TDP headroom.)

AMD, on the other hand, has waaaaay better Vulkan drivers. If I were buying a card for gaming, I'd go with AMD or Nvidia over Intel. If I were buying a card as a compute accelerator, then it would definitely be Intel or Nvidia. AMD cards suck in this department.

Anyways, if the idle power draw is fixed, Vulkan performance isn't too terrible, and the price is reasonable I might pull the trigger. At worst it's a good compute accelerator, at best it'll be a good "low-end" gaming card. The B570 will probably sell for less than $250 USD. I can't see it going for more than that. I figure it'll sit between an AMD RX 7600/XT and Nvidia RTX 4060/TI (probably the non XT and TI models, but who knows till we see reviews).

[smitty3268]

The pricing on these is tempting, and the amount of VRAM is nice. Still, I'd definitely wait a couple months to see what the competition is going to come out with before jumping on one of these. The drivers have not been very good so far, and I doubt that's going to change on linux for battlemage, but we'll see once it gets released.