Arc Pro B70: The B770 gamers never got
PC Games Hardware has tested the Intel Arc Pro B70 in games, giving us one of the clearest looks yet at the full BMG-G31 Battlemage GPU. This is the same larger Xe2 design many expected to see in a gaming-focused Arc B770, but Intel currently offers it only through workstation Arc Pro cards.
The Arc Pro B70 uses 32 Xe2 cores, 4,096 cores, 32 ray tracing units and 256 XMX engines. The reference card tested by PCGH has 32GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus, 608 GB/s of bandwidth and a 230W board power rating. It also supports PCIe 5.0 x16, unlike Arc B580, which is limited to PCIe 4.0 x8.
Source: PC Games Hardware
According to PCGH, Arc Pro B70 is 36% faster than Arc B580 in rasterization and 45% faster in ray tracing. The card also beats the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB across the tested games, while the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB stays ahead in ray tracing and path tracing. This puts BMG-G31 above Intel’s current gaming lineup, but not in a consumer product.
Source: PC Games Hardware
The outlet says the card runs close to 230W in raster workloads and reaches similar efficiency to Arc B580. It still falls behind AMD RDNA 4 and NVIDIA Blackwell cards in performance per watt. PCGH also notes that the 2.8 GHz boost clock is rarely sustained, with average clocks sitting just under 2.6 GHz.
Arc B770
PCGH also estimated what a gaming Arc B770 could have offered. A 16GB version of BMG-G31 with 20 GT/s GDDR6 memory and a 3.0 GHz typical clock could be up to 15% faster than Arc Pro B70 . A smaller change with higher board power but similar clocks would bring only a 6% to 7% gain. The theoretical card would use a 256-bit bus, 640 GB/s bandwidth and a 300W TBP.
Source: PC Games Hardware
