A leaked firmware in an Intel driver package has name-dropped BMG-G31, but Troubled Chipzilla still will not say if a proper mid-range Arc is coming.
Intel’s Arc B770 has been the GPU rumour that refuses to die, and the company keeps feeding it by doing absolutely nothing useful in public. Leaks and reports have been piling up for ages, yet Intel has stayed cagey, even at CES, where it found other things to talk about.
Now, a fresh breadcrumb has turned up inside an Intel GPU firmware package, with a “BMG-G31” entry spotted in the driver firmware folder. The find was credited to @Haze2K1, a Reddit user, and it appears to be early or preliminary support for a consumer GPU variant based on BMG-G31.
This is not the first time the label has surfaced in Intel tooling. BMG-G31 was recently added to Intel’s VTune Profile software, which is the sort of dry, unglamorous hint that engineers use when something exists, even if marketing would rather pretend it does not.
Intel has managed to tease itself, mentioning BMG-G31 on official social channels and then pulling the posts. What has not changed is the silence around any Arc B770, or any other BMG-G31-based card, leaving everyone guessing whether this is a product or just a placeholder for a plan.
A previous leak suggested BMG-G31 would arrive in consumer and pro variants, keeping the Arc B770 idea alive. Intel still has not offered a timeline or even a straight answer on when gamers might see anything beyond the current trickle.
It has been a year since the first Battlemage discrete GPUs launched, and there are only two consumer cards to show for it. The Arc B580 and Arc B570 do not really cover the mid-range properly, and a B770 with a bigger chip and 16GB of VRAM would be the obvious gap-filler, assuming Chipzilla ever decides to ship the thing.
