“Battlemage is Next” Intel confirms in Xe2 architecture video

Intel’s Tom Petersen teases their upcoming “Battlemage” GPUs

As part of their latest new “Architecture All Access,” Intel has released its first proper teaser for “Battlemage”, the company’s next-generation of discrete GPUs. In the video, Intel’s Tom Petersen provides many architectural details of the company’s Xe2 graphics architecture and says that “Battlemange is Next.” This architecture powers Intel’s Lunar Lake graphics and upcoming Battlemage discrete GPUs.

In the video below, Intel examines the ray tracing performance of its Xe2 graphics architecture. With Xe2, Intel now has three traversal pipelines and two ray triangle intersection units within each ray tracing unit. These can deliver up to 3x and 2x performance boosts, respectively, for these aspects of ray tracing. Furthermore, Tom has detailed other changes across their Xe2 graphics architecture, which includes a 2x boost to pixel blend rate. Additionally, Intel has added SIMD16 support for improved game compatibility.

Yesterday, an Intel Battlemage B580 GPU was listed at a US retailer for $259. This GPU features a 12GB frame buffer, making it a strong value-focused GPU from Intel. After all, all AMD and Nvidia GPUs at this price point only have 8GB of RAM. As a result, these GPUs are struggling to play some modern games. For example, STALKER 2 doesn’t run well on 8GB GPUs without significant reductions in-game quality settings (see our PC Performance Review to learn more).

Read more about Intel’s Battlemage teaser on the OC3D Forums.