Intel Arc Battlemage finally shows signs of life

By Monica J. White Published October 22, 2024

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.