A couple of weeks ago, a mooted high-end variant of Intel's Battlemage gaming graphics architecture was spotted in a shipping manifest. That was labelled for "R&D" purposes, but still had me hoping Intel was cooking something up that might compete with Nvidia's RTX 5070 on performance but radically undercut it on price. This latest spot of the increasingly hallowed Intel G31 GPU is a fraction more straight up, in some regards at least, and so even more tantalising.
Once again, it's X user Haze2K1 and the shipping data website NBD that's furnishing us with an insight into Intel's graphics machinations. But this time, instead of the G31 GPU itself popping up in the data, it's supporting components for the chip, including socket stiffeners (ooo, er!) and cylindrical multicontact connectors, whatever they are.
The shipments were to Intel's Vietnam facility, where Haze2K1 claims the company's reference-design Limited Edition boards are produced. You could take from that, should you wish to be optimistic, something along the lines of Intel making preparations to start production on a line of G31-based gaming graphics cards.
But hang on, even if that's true, exactly what can you expect from G31? As I explained last time around, Intel's latest Arc B580 and B570 GPUs use the BMG-G21 chip and the bigger G31 GPU has long been rumoured as the next step up in the Battlemage hierarchy.
There's no official information, but the rumour mill has settled on 32 execution units (EUs) for G31, fully 60% more than the 20 EUs of the existing Intel Arc B580. Going by the raw performance of the B580, you might then expect performance up at Nvidia RTX 5070 levels or even beyond.
In practice, that seems pretty ambitious. But if G31 can at least get near the 5070, well, that would be pretty exciting, especially if Intel retained its typically aggressive GPU pricing strategy. Hence, my speculation a few weeks ago that G31 could have the makings of a $400 RTX 5070 killer.
Of course, you have to wonder why, if Intel is indeed planning to release a G31-based graphics card, it's taking so long, what with the B580 launching last December. There's been some talk that G31 suffers even more acutely from the excessive CPU load that has compromised the appeal of the Arc B580 board. But ultimately, we just don't know.
That said, if Intel could get a G31-based graphics card out in 2025, it should have over a year to win customers. We wouldn't expect properly new mid-range GPUs from Nvidia until spring 2027. Likewise, AMD's RDNA 4-based GPUs, including the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT are pretty new on the market, with the RX 9060 series not even on sale yet.
The bottom line is that there's still time for Intel to make an impact. So, get those fingers and toes crossed and keep watching this space.
