Over a week ago, a larger "Battlemage" gaming graphics card model was on a fair few CES 2026 wish lists. Discrete GPU enthusiasts soon found out that Intel and its manufacturing partners had gone all-in on "Panther Lake-H" during the Las Vegas-based event. A non-appearance of the speculated " Arc B770 " SKU has caused a stir within the consumer PC hardware community—many questioned whether the (allegedly) troubled Xe2-HPG "Battlemage" dGPU project had encountered another major obstacle. Shortly after the conclusion of CES '26, a promising "BMG-G31" BIOS update was found in a new driver package. Despite popping up in software updates and libraries , the release status of Team Blue's "Arc B770" design remains murky.

In order to find out more, VideoCardz has reached out to contacts within the graphics card industry. According to a fresh report, unnamed sources at two of Intel's add-in-card (AIC) partner companies claim that they have not received Arc B770 test boards. Also, final specifications have not been distributed. The two AIC sources stated that they "cannot confirm whether the product is still on track to launch." Elaborating further, one of the informants believes that test boards are being evaluated at Intel labs, but nowhere else. They do not know when they will receive initial samples. VideoCardz thinks that a board partner can only get up to speed production-wise with healthy lead times—perhaps six weeks at a minimum—once finalized reference hardware and specifications are handed over. The Blue Team could be focusing exclusively on putting together their own Limited Edition design, but previous "Arc graphics on desktop" launches have included a good number of custom options—produced by Acer, ASRock, GUNNIR, MAXSUN, and Sparkle.