In the last few weeks, we’ve been bombarded with reports regarding Nvidia’s upcoming top graphics cards, but leakers have all been silent about Intel Arc Battlemage. Today, however, we saw signs of life straight from the source as Intel has included Battlemage graphics cards in its new media drivers.
As spotted by VideoCardz, Intel added BMG — the shortcut for Battlemage — to its latest round of drivers on GitHub. This covers an addition to the open-source media driver for the video acceleration API (VAAPI), which includes various codecs for video decoding and encoding. The column labeled as BMG looks pretty bare, though, with zero encoding support so far.
The lack of encoding isn’t a problem, as it’s still early days. Although initial leaks pointed to a late 2024 launch for Intel Arc Battlemage, it’s now clear that won’t be the case. If the lineup won’t be revealed until next year, Intel has a lot of time to work on its drivers and add support for all the most popular codecs.
With encoding completely missing right now, we can only go by decoding to determine what Battlemage may or may not support in the future. Right now, there’s zero support for versatile video coding (VVC), also referred to as H.266. That’s a curious omission, as Intel supports H.266 with its Lunar Lake processors, and it managed to beat both Nvidia and AMD to the punch when it comes to that codec. Intel might still add it later on, as this standard is said to be highly efficient.
Despite the silence, we know that Battlemage is out there, as a recently leaked benchmark showed us what could be the first next-gen Intel discrete GPU in action. With Intel’s GPU market share dropping to 0%, it could use all the hype it can get. The last official update came from Tom Petersen, an Intel fellow, during an interview in January 2024. Petersen said he hoped we might hear more about Battlemage before CES 2025, but he didn’t promise anything, so it’s not surprising that there’s been no news on the matter.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.