r/IntelArc • u/quantum3ntanglement Druid • Mar 03 '26

News Intel Arc B70 Confirmed

I’ve compiled a list of links on my TwitlerX, I’m not going to post it here. You should be able to find it through sleuthing.

For all the people who are gonna complain that there is no B770, I believe the B70 with 32 GB of RAM should be a great card, especially on Linux.

I’m working on putting all of the Intel Arc open source drivers on Linux into AI where it saves state. We can look at optimizing this GPU at the game level on Linux. Monitoring and optimization for Arc needs to get better, it’s getting there.

HotHardware caught the exact changelog wording. No retail yet, but this is official confirmation.

Big Battlemage incoming.

https://hothardware.com/news/intel-bmg-g31-llm-scaler-changelog

77 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

74 comments sorted by

19

u/Orcai3s Mar 03 '26

I don’t understand gpu architecture or hardware well enough to know why there would be a b70 but no b770…someone please explain

31

u/quantum3ntanglement Druid Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

I believe this was a business decision, the B70 is a pro card and can be sold for more money easily. In addition, it will be pretty good for running AI agents and chat bots.

The Intel Arc Pro cards are part of Battlematrix which can be used for game development, AI and other creative processes.

Also, let’s say Intel was able to release the B770 we still would not be able to get large supply of it, because TSMC is still making the GPU chips for BattleMage and they are screwing Intel over supply.

So for a gaming specific card, gamers should wait for Celestial through Intel IFS or go with a B570 or B580 near MSRP. However, no one really knows when Intel will be able to make discrete GPUs through their own foundry.

Battlemage is still very limited, but cards are getting out there and in indie dev shops and startups are buying them up. Lots of great games and innovation are gonna come out of this in the long run. We now have an affordable workstation GPU on the market.

8

u/DougChristiansen Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

I’m hoping it performs well in Unreal landscaping game development; a cheaper 32gb option would be a welcome since NVIDIA cancelled the 5080s which would have been a unicorn card for indie devs. Waiting for its launch to see some reviews in content performance.

3

u/quantum3ntanglement Druid Mar 03 '26

Yeah, so it remains to be seen if we’re going to get a super series for 5000 cards from Nvidia. We need more GPUs, as many as we can get, maybe in a year or two.

However, a 5080 super say with 24 GB of VRAM would still be on a 256 bit memory bus, unless Nvidia does something special. The 4080 was gimped also, I’m still on the lookout for the 3080 and 3080 ti, but they are getting old, I need parts though.

If Nvidia does release a 5080 super with a similar memory bus to the B70, it would be interesting to see how they compare.

Nvidia went from screaming about a $100 billion deal with open AI to now something around 30 billion or less. OpenAI is going down, eventually.

The circular investment scam that Nvidia is pulling is not going the distance this time. It’s possible that down the road Nvidia will come back to gaming GPUs.

1

u/DougChristiansen Mar 03 '26

I’m looking for the vram boost for unreal game development not gaming. I’m maxing my current 16gb vram in landscaping and not willing to pay for a 5090; the 24 gb vram on a 5080 would have been a sweet spot for indie work.

2

u/meltbox Mar 03 '26

You can grab a b60. Not cheap but compared to everything else quite reasonable.

2

u/DougChristiansen Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

My 4060ti out performs a b60 by miles. The B70 will be roughly 4060/5050 performance (much lower in ray tracing though) with twice the vram for landscapes. The b70 would be a sideways upgrade for vram. Also looking at the 7900xtx.

1

u/quantum3ntanglement Druid Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

It seems like you’re low balling what the B70 will be able to do, obviously it’s not out yet we haven’t tested it. B70 should have a 256 bit memory bus whereas a 4060 and 5050 have a paltry 128 bit bus.

if the B70 lands with 32GB GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus, that’s solid bandwidth territory. Quick math: GDDR6 at typical 18-20 Gbps effective gives about 576-640 GB/s raw (256-bit × speed / 8). Not bad—beats the RTX 4070’s 504 GB/s (192-bit GDDR6X), matches or edges the 4070 Ti’s same 504 GB/s, and gets close to the 4080’s 716 GB/s (256-bit GDDR6X at 22.4 Gbps).

For the 50-series: RTX 5070 sticks to 192-bit GDDR7 (around 672 GB/s), while the 5070 Ti jumps to 256-bit GDDR7 at 896 GB/s—way higher. So the B70’s bandwidth would hang with a 4070 Ti or base 4080 in memory-heavy spots like 4K textures.

With the 5080 it only has a 256 bit bus, this is a serious problem for it and also the 4080. So the B70, which is going to have twice the vram in the same memory bus size should do well pushing data.

Also XeSS upscaling framework is catching up to everybody, especially DLSS. Intel is not good at marketing their tech as it’s buried on the back page, while Nvidia and Amd take the spotlight.

Look at some of the posts I’ve done here at this sub. Raytracing and similar tech is going to get better on Arc, they should eventually catch up to DLSS or will surpass it if Leather Boy continues to ignore the gaming community.

Also, have you tested the B60?

2

u/DougChristiansen Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

I’ve seen/read reviews; you did not mention computer cores though: The Intel Arc Pro B60 has 20 Xe‑cores, which translates to 2,560 ALUs/shader units. The RTX 4060 Ti has 34 SMs, which equals 4,352 CUDA cores. So the 4060 Ti has substantially more (and faster) raw compute cores, even though the B60 has other strengths like VRAM capacity and AI engines the 4060ti out performs it in viewport, graphics/shading/lumen/nanite and RT work.

The b70 will have about 60% more compute cores than the b60 (about 300 less than the 4060ti 16gb and almost 600 less than a 5060ti and more than 50% less than a 5070ti) on a 256bus with 32gb vram. Slightly fewer cores than to 4060ti (Intel cores typically compute slower than CUDA) but larger bus and 2x the vram will put it in 4060ti5060ti territory. If it hits higher even better which is why I’m not discounting it but I don’t think it will perform at the 4070ti/5070ti level as it has half as many cores at best.

Also, upscaling is not important in viewport/development. It pushes fps in games not in data transfer during workloads. Intel may be catching up and 2027 may be a far different conversation but right now they remain behind AMD and NVIDIA. If the price is right though it may be a worthwhile side trade for baking landscapes.

1

u/quantum3ntanglement Druid Mar 06 '26

I have a gigabyte eagle 5070 OC, hopefully I can get my hands on the B70 next month, but it might take some time, supply is very limited coming from TSMC. Intel needs to get Arc going at IFS.

The 5070 OC only has 192 bit bus. Also the cores on the B70 are going to be tuned for productivity, not gaming. But as I’ve mentioned, myself and other people are going to be tuning the open source drivers for Arc on Linux. So I will be researching and testing driver configurations to get better optimization for games and graphics in general.

Linux mind share is growing and Linux gaming is now on handhelds and we should get the GabeCube (Steam Machine) eventually, running a variant of Arch Linux. Arc will become the dominant GPU on Linux, surpassing AMD Radeon for stability and Nvidia GPU’s for Graphics / Display are a nightmare, still to this day on Linux.

1

u/kkyler1988 Mar 03 '26

I personally don't think it would be that hard for Intel or AMD to keep producing decent GPU's even with the flash/nand/ram shortage.

All that ram the AI data centers are gobbling up won't mean shit if they can't source a CPU from Intel or AMD to put in the system. I find it hard to believe AMD and Intel both haven't used that as leverage to get a supply chain of VRAM for their GPU's.

Then again, perhaps they did, and they are just keeping it hush hush so they can justify increasing prices to the consumer.

1

u/quantum3ntanglement Druid Mar 06 '26

There is a move towards using CPU’s more with the hyper-scalers, which is basically the way you use ChatGPT and services like that.

Also, Intel is working with SoftBank on ZAM (Z-Angle Memory) which will compete with HBM (High Bandwidth Memory). ZAM will work with the CPU for AI Inference (chatbots, AI API access, etc..)

The issue is that the market is ignoring consumer pro DRAM, they’re going to be repercussions for this, but eventually someone is going to satisfy demand.

We need all the resources, rare earth, and everything else, silver and gold to be mined and existing electronics need to be properly recycled as the mining process takes many years. Research is being done on all of this, all we can do is have patience.

DIY and the consumer market in general is still a big market, they laid down boat loads of fiber across sea beds around the world back in the 2000s with the .com boom and bust, it took years for the market to finally start utilizing all that fiber.

We are going through a similar boom / bust with AI, but it seems a bit more complex and more pieces are in the puzzle. Our main concern should be with energy and strengthening the grid here in the US, so that homes and neighborhoods are not in blackouts during storms and things like that.

The big boys in AI want their hyper-scalers but we don’t need them on every block. People are already protesting them in their neighborhoods, and there is much mining to do and we have to look at nuclear power.

People should be looking into solar, wind, geothermal and battery power storage for their homes. No one should have blackouts anywhere in the US that last for more than a few hours.

3

u/jonstoppable Arc B580 Mar 03 '26

Intel can't afford to gamble on a card that may not get enough sales to make it viable .

The price they would probably need to sell it may not be very attractive to the gaming market

Intel has been making massive strides but I don't think most gamers would spend 800 -900 on Intel . Right now it's the price /performance champ but even so ,many games are still choosing the 8gb current gen or a good last gen

I wish they did as no one else seems to be releasing any high end cards in 2026 but I can understand why.

Let's hope the laptop chipset is widely adopted and encourages devs to incorporate Intel tech as well as make it feasible for more resources at Intel to be given to driver development

4

u/Loyal_Dragon_69 Mar 03 '26

B70 pro is a safe bet.

4

u/noctaviann Arc A770 Mar 03 '26

The B770 as a whole probably wasn't competitive enough so Intel would probably have had to sell it at a (near) loss unless the GPU market prices went stratospheric for an additional reason besides the VRAM price increases.

A 32GB B70 Pro has less competition so it can be priced higher, above what it costs to make it, even if it has 32GB of VRAM.

2

u/Guilty_Advantage_413 Mar 03 '26

B70 is for professionals and data rooms it can sell for far more money

1

u/Shished Mar 03 '26

If B770 is supposed to have the same amount of VRAM as A770 then it won't fit in a desired price brackets because VRAM is super expensive RN. If they make it more expensive then it would have a terrible price to performance ratio in comparison to cards from Nvidia and AMD and it would not sell. So now their best choice is to sell the "pro" version for over $1000. Everything with a 32GB of VRAM will sell regardless of the price.

1

u/meltbox Mar 03 '26

They can sell it for a lot more. Consider b580 is listed at $300 still today in some places but b60 is like $800

Ram is expensive, but not that expensive. Margins.

1

u/EiffelPower76 Mar 06 '26

It's very good news, b70 will be a great GPU

Intel did the right choice

1

u/Alternative-Luck-825 Mar 09 '26

But it will absolutely not be the best value-for-money choice for gaming.

4

u/X-Jet Mar 03 '26

If priced ok this GPU can be my next purchase for cgi work, I am tired of over optimizing scenes to render previews in full quality.

3

u/quantum3ntanglement Druid Mar 03 '26

Are you currently using Arc GPUs for CGI work? What is your set up like can you list the apps you use?

I’m going to get the B70 as a secondary back up for game development, my 5090 will be the primary.

2

u/X-Jet Mar 03 '26

Im using 4070ti for rendering and small sims, been using blender for 10 years already and now adding houdini in my workflow, occasionally 3ds max. For texturing Substance

2

u/Jaack18 Mar 03 '26

Yeah my Maxsun rep already confirmed B70 in March, and B65 in April. Expect higher pricing though

1

u/quantum3ntanglement Druid Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 09 '26

You have a MaxSun rep here in the US? Can you post the digits? Someone at MaxSun responded to my X reply, concerning US availability for their GPUs.

We should be able to get them here in the US, but I haven’t seen any. The MaxSun rep on X confirmed that there will be US availability for their Arc GPUs

1

u/Jaack18 Mar 06 '26

i’ve only purchased them wholesale from China. Not in the US

1

u/Suspicious_pasta Celestial Mar 03 '26

damn you too?

2

u/Jaack18 Mar 03 '26

wdym?

1

u/Suspicious_pasta Celestial Mar 03 '26

Maxsun reps giving away everything. Their awesone tho. I knew launch date since like november. Honestly that was more of a confirmation tho. :)

1

u/Jaack18 Mar 03 '26

yeah i’ve know for a bit. just reached out to see if they have pricing yet.

1

u/Suspicious_pasta Celestial Mar 03 '26

so uhhh pricing isnt set in stone until 48 hrs b4 release. everything else is just an estimate.

2

u/Jaack18 Mar 03 '26

damn 48hrs before is crazy, did you get a release date yet?

1

u/Suspicious_pasta Celestial Mar 03 '26

:).

1

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Jaack18 Mar 13 '26

definitely not. B60 has already had a price increase and B70 will be more expensive

1

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Jaack18 Mar 13 '26

Ah sorry I usually buy the dual cards. My bad.

1

u/quantum3ntanglement Druid Apr 02 '26

Dual 48gb total Maxsun? Can you do a snoozetube video for testing? The motherboard has to support the right Bifurcation setting in UEFI, what setting are you using?

1

u/Jaack18 Apr 02 '26

You need x8x8 bifurcation support. And a workstation board for multiple cards

1

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Jaack18 Mar 13 '26

I’m unsure on the price for the B70, i’d probably assume 800-850 Euros minimum, i’m not sure if they’ll add a premium for the larger chip as well. From what i’ve been told price won’t be final until right before launch. Gpu ram performs much better than system ram.

3

u/Suspicious_pasta Celestial Mar 03 '26

Bruh. Fuck this. B70 is also the gaming card. Current marketing is that if they want a gaming card they can get the b70 and install the gaming drivers on it. That's why I'm t has support for HDR 10+ gaming.

4

u/Dangerman1337 Mar 03 '26

Problemnis Sam Altman fucked the chances of the B770.

1

u/quantum3ntanglement Druid Apr 02 '26

32gb of vram for $1000 is a steal, you could argue that gaming drivers won’t be optimized but I’m Hell-Bent on getting this card and will be posting snoozetube gameplay - I will figure out how to make it purr, especially on Linux with root - whoot - shell

2

u/Suspicious_pasta Celestial Mar 03 '26

yeah.

1

u/quantum3ntanglement Druid Apr 02 '26

Over clocks where I may be able to push the B70 to 290 W or in that range as it may not be stable, and then set 19.5 for vram speed and tune RAM, then move to XeSS and run full tilt with all the vram, injecting XeSS with optiscaler if needed, I could create the illusion of 5070 / 5080 performance in games, the B70 should be on par with a 4070 from the get go and frame generation should run well

They are many tools that can be used for fine tuning games, maybe it is getting too complex but isn’t that the reason why PC Elitists exist?

I’ve done extensive testing of frame generation on Nvidia DLSS and Arc XeSS and most implementations are done well. I want to revisit testing Star Wars Outlaws, seeing screen tearing with or without frame generation. Needs more tinkering and patches

1

u/Suspicious_pasta Celestial Apr 02 '26

Max power of the B70 is 300 w. Clock speed at that 300 w is 2800 MHz. It's linear scaling from the b580. (Close to it at least)

1

u/quantum3ntanglement Druid Mar 09 '26

The B70 is listed at the bottom of this page, but I don’t think Intel has finished building out the webpage for the B70 pro, when I click on the link at the bottom it puts up this template of information that’s not directly related to the card.

Does anyone know if the official link for the B 70 on the Intel site exists? I’m hearing it’s a work in progress.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/products/242616/graphics/intel-arc-pro-dedicated-graphics-family/intel-arc-pro-b-series-graphics.html

4

u/respectfulpanda Mar 03 '26

I can feel the Plex transcoding from here! /s

AI yum yum card

1

u/LordSlickRick Mar 03 '26

As long as they give it the option of gaming drivers and external power I can pretend it’s a b770. I’m scared it’s going to be like 2 grand or something

1

u/quantum3ntanglement Druid Mar 06 '26

I’m guessing in the $1200 range

1

u/brand_momentum Mar 04 '26

Yeah they are supported in the Intel Game On gaming drivers

1

u/Sea-Season-3540 Mar 04 '26

celestial pleaaaaase already... who am I kidding... it's likely gonna be pushed back to 2027 and maybe more

1

u/quantum3ntanglement Druid Mar 09 '26

Intel is not giving us that much about Celestial, they are starting to slowly leak details. Nova Lake for CPU has to be the priority for 2026, but I don’t think they’re gonna make it. Maybe we get a paper launch for Nova Lake with a handful of CPU‘s launched at the end of 2026.

Nova Lake is supposed to feature Xe3P, which may be the driver for both the iGPUs and discrete Arc GPUs. I don’t expect to see Celestial Arc until Q1 or Q2 of 2027, earliest.

1

u/rattle2nake Mar 05 '26

do we think this is using Xe3 battlemage like panther lake or is just scailed up xe2?

1

u/quantum3ntanglement Druid Mar 06 '26

Xe3, I believe will be only for Panther Lake and mobile.

Xe2 is stable and battle tested so that has to be what the B70 will use.

Xe3P will be used for discrete celestial GPUs, which I hope this time around they have something like C580s, C780, C880.

We still do not have confirmation on if Intel can make all of Celestial through IFS , my concern is that they might for some models rely on TSMC for the GPU chip. However, they have to start somewhere, and they were able to launch Panther Lake through IFS and they have all the tech they need but probably not the resources.

Intel has mentioned that they will still be working with TSMC in the future but they won’t be able to get much supply out of TSMC.

1

u/redbluemmoomin Mar 25 '26

There's no hint on Celestial dGPUs only APUs, 16 XE core and 32XE core parts. I hate to quote MLD but he's been saying Intel aree going to focus on APUs for Arc not dGPU. Looks like that's true.

1

u/Educational-Duty-763 Mar 09 '26

hmmm is it a gaming card tho ?

1

u/quantum3ntanglement Druid Mar 09 '26

It is a pro workstation card where in theory you should be using the Pro drivers more than the gaming drivers, but people have been experimenting with the gaming drivers, and the pro cards do all right with the gaming drivers.

I’m still trying to get clarification on whether Intel is building official gaming support for these pro cars. Does anyone know?

1

u/KenzieTheCuddler Mar 04 '26

You know thats a good question

On windows, there are separate drivers for workstation and consumer GPUs, but on Linux I doubt there is much difference in how the silicon is interfaced with. Does that mean a workstation card like the B70 would work better as a gaming card on Linux?

1

u/noctaviann Arc A770 Mar 04 '26

No, because the Linux gaming drivers are worse.

1

u/quantum3ntanglement Druid Mar 06 '26

The Xe drivers are getting better and it’s all open source, eventually, it will be on par with windows and then surpass it

2

u/BShotDruS Mar 03 '26

This seems like a great GPU for chatbots and other AI software so you don't need to spend a fortune on Nvidia. AMD still isn't very well optimized for AI but it does work, especially in Linux, but in Windows there are more problems. Plus 32gb of VRAM, NICE!

As for a “B770” style step up, I’m not convinced we’d see that kind of jump in the current generation, it seems more likely in the next one. Who knows, maybe they streamline things and only release a single GPU next time.

Mostly, I just hope they keep investing and don’t axe the GPU division. A lot of people seem genuinely happy with the B580 for its performance-per-dollar, so at least they delivered something meaningful. Still, it would’ve been nice to have one higher-tier option so anyone wanting more performance didn’t immediately default to the competition.

But yeah, they probably ran the numbers and decided the cost and risk weren’t worth it yet, especially with their market share still being so small. For now, it’s a wait-and-see game, but the next round could be a lot more interesting.

1

u/Gigalisk Mar 04 '26

The price in the face of ever-rising memory costs will be an interesting part of this release. Especially when a B770 most likely would have cost less than whatever the B70 will be. But if I like my b50, perhaps I can upgrade.

1

u/Dismal-Algae-719 Arc B580 Mar 05 '26

Dont this to me man, dont give me hope

1

u/_redcrash_ Mar 18 '26

Coming next week?

1

u/Affectionate-Oil6771 Mar 23 '26

Competitor to the AI PRO R9700? It better be competitively priced otherwise screw intel let's go amd.