Intel’s Big Battlemage GPU has finally been tested in games and it looks more like an RTX 5060 Ti than a monster.
The mystery around Intel’s Arc Pro B70 has been solved by a set of gaming benchmarks from German site PCGamesHardware. The result is disappointing, useful and a bit awkward for Chipzilla.
The Arc Pro B70 uses the larger Battlemage GPU, codenamed G31. It is the bigger sibling of the G21 chip found in Intel’s Arc B580, part of Chipzilla’s second-generation Xe2 graphics architecture.
The funny bit is that G31 appears to have been designed with gaming in mind. It will not be sold that way.
Instead, Chipzilla has stuffed the B70 with 32GB of VRAM and aimed it at local AI model work. In this market, “low cost” apparently means about $1,000.
PCGamesHardware ran the Arc Pro B70 through a stack of games, which gives us the nearest answer we are likely to get. In traditional raster gaming, it lands almost exactly on the performance of the Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB.
That sounds passable until ray tracing and path tracing are switched on. Then the B70 falls noticeably behind Nvidia’s mid-range card. Anyone hoping for an RTX 5070 killer can put the bunting away. Even calling it an RTX 5070 rival now looks a bit generous.
The useful part is that the numbers show why Intel never turned G31 into a gaming card. RTX 5060 Ti performance is fine only when the price and silicon size make sense.
G31 does not make much sense there. It measures 368 mm² on a TSMC N5-class production node, while Nvidia’s GB206 chip in the RTX 5060 Ti is just 181 mm² on a similar process node.
Smaller chips are cheaper chips, which is not exactly secret lore from a forbidden semiconductor monastery. The RTX 5070’s GB205 die is 263mm², while the RTX 5080’s GB203 is 378mm².
That means Chipzilla has something close to RTX 5080-sized silicon delivering RTX 5060 Ti gaming performance,
There is one possible excuse. Intel probably hasn’t spent much time polishing the gaming drivers for the G31, since the Arc Pro B70 isn’t aimed at gamers.
Even then, better drivers would not save it. The G31 has 32 Xe cores compared with 20 in G21, which is 60 per cent more hardware.
PCGamesHardware found G31 was 34 per cent faster than G21 in raster gaming. Nvidia’s RTX 5070 was 87 per cent faster, which leaves Chipzilla staring at a gap no driver fairy is likely to close.
Even perfect scaling would still leave G31 trailing the RTX 5070. Against a die-size peer such as the RTX 5080, the comparison is grim.
The Arc Pro B70 may have a role as a relatively affordable AI card with a fat 32GB of VRAM. As a gaming GPU, Big Battlemage looks too large, too costly and too slow to fight where it was once expected to swing.
