A new variant of Intel's latest Battlemage gaming graphics has been spotted in a shipping manifest and the hope is that it could be the killer $400 gaming GPU we've been waiting for. Think RTX 5070 performance for RTX 5060 Ti 8GB money. Well, that's the dream, anyway.
X user Haze2K1 (via Videocardz) spotted a listing for an Intel BMG-31 GPU in a manifest on shipping data website NBD. Intel's latest Arc B580 and B570 GPUs are based on the BMG-G21 chip, while the G31 GPU has long been rumoured as the next step up in the Battlemage hierarchy.
Previous leaks have indicated the G31 GPU packs in 32 execution units or EUs. That compares with the 20 EUs of the existing Intel Arc B580. In really rough terms, then, G31 should be about 50% faster and roughly competitive with an Nvidia RTX 5070 or an AMD Radeon RX 9070.
The catch here is that the mere existence of an Intel graphics cards with a G31 GPU being shipped across the world does not prove that Intel plans to launch a retail product. Another rumour from around three weeks ago suggested that the G31 chip as a retail product was cancelled late last year.
Likewise, the shipping manifest lists the card as an "R&D" or research and development item. Of course, that's exactly what a pre-launch card would be listed as even if Intel was indeed planning on launching a retail G31-based graphics card, perhaps branded as Intel Arc B770.
If anything, the main reason to doubt that Intel is actually planning on pushing through a G31 graphics card into the retail market is that the launch window for a competitive offering is narrowing. The longer Intel leaves it following the release of the Nvidia and AMD competition, the less of an impact G31 is likely to make.
Arguably, G31 would have to launch sometime in 2025 to make any sense at all, given you would expect Nvidia and AMD to release their own follow ups in the $500 GPU space towards the end of 2026 or early in 2027.
All that said, we'd welcome a G31-based gaming graphics card at almost any time, provided it's priced right. Intel's B580 board has several very promising attributes, including strong ray-tracing performance, and Intel's XeSS upscaling technology is pretty decent, too.
Given how aggressively Intel has priced the B580 and B570, you'd also expect an G31 board to undercut the likes of the RTX 5070 pretty comprehensively, raising the prospect of a card with performance that's roughly competitive with an RTX 5070 for around the $400 mark. Anywho, we'll have to wait and see with all our fingers and toes crossed to see if Intel does ever wheel out a G31-based GPU and if it does, just how fast it is and how well it performs.
