Intel Arc Pro B70: Even Without Dedicated Drivers, It Outperforms the Arc B580 in Gaming

Intel has finally showcased the true capabilities of the Battlemage BMG-G31 chip, a GPU that has long been confined to rumors and is now set to debut with the new Arc Pro B70. Although this solution is designed for professionals, it offers an interesting glimpse into what the future of Intel's gaming counterparts could potentially be.

Tests published by Expreview highlight how the Intel Arc Pro B70 significantly outperforms the Arc B580, the current gaming benchmark of the Battlemage range. In benchmarks conducted across five games at 1440p resolution, the new professional proposal registers an average advantage of 32.5% over the B580, while still trailing the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB by about 6.8% on average.

However, the most significant data comes from Cyberpunk 2077, where the Arc Pro B70 reaches 90 FPS compared to the 68 FPS of the NVIDIA offering, representing a 14% advantage for Intel in a title traditionally favoring GeForce GPUs.

With ray tracing, the situation appears even more competitive. In this area, the Arc Pro B70 averages 1% higher than the RTX 5060 Ti, winning in three out of five games and showing a 40% increase compared to the Arc B580. In F1 2025, the margin reaches 14% over the NVIDIA card, confirming that the BMG-G31 chip possesses remarkable technical resources even in advanced scenarios.

Additionally, synthetic benchmarks from 3DMark show noteworthy results: the Arc Pro B70 surpasses the RTX 5060 Ti by 21% and the Arc B580 by 45%, even considering Intel's specific optimizations for this suite. The most intriguing aspect is that the card is not optimized for this type of applications, suggesting a substantial margin for improvement in gaming. After all, Intel has demonstrated over the years how much software optimization can make a difference.

Clearly, one of the main advantages lies in the memory: the card boasts 32GB of GDDR6 ECC VRAM, which is significantly higher than most modern gaming GPUs. This factor mainly impacts AI and machine learning workloads. In MLPerf Client tests, the Arc Pro B70 reaches 95.5 tokens per second, compared to 73.7 tok/s of the RTX 5060 Ti. Even more pronounced is the advantage in TTFT (time to first token), where the Intel solution proves to be over four times faster due to the greater amount of available memory.

The current main limitation, therefore, does not lie with the chip but with its commercial positioning. The Arc Pro B70 uses Intel Pro professional drivers instead of the dedicated gaming Arc drivers. This is why many observers see the BMG-G31 chip as the ideal foundation for a possible Arc B770, a mid-high-end gaming model that, with less memory and optimized drivers, could approach the performance of an RTX 5070. Unfortunately, the B770 has never been confirmed, and according to some rumors, Intel may have even abandoned the project due to current memory costs.

However, the price remains a sticking point. The Arc Pro B70 is offered at $949, a figure justified by the segment in which it is positioned, namely workstations and AI. In the case of a gaming variant, competing with NVIDIA and AMD would mean proposing a possible B770 around $500, a figure that is considerably more challenging to achieve due to memory constraints.

For now, we can say that the Arc Pro B70 lays excellent foundations for the company's future, and collaboration with NVIDIA could result in truly interesting products. Unfortunately, though, at the moment, there are very few certainties, if any, so we suggest not to feed false hopes.