Sick of NVIDIA's RTX 5000 stock shortages? High-end Intel Battlemage GPU rumor may cheer you up

Intel could have a trio of new Battlemage GPUs in the works, and if one of those is a higher-end model - as it may well be - the hope is that it might give NVIDIA's RTX 5000 graphics cards some competition.

The potential GPUs were spotted in the most recent patch for Linux, but only as PCI IDs (so just a basic identification code, with no name or other details), as highlighted by Tomasz Gawroński on X (see the above post).

Of course, a few ID numbers floating around may not mean much, and nothing could come of this.

Even if something does, we don't know where these possible GPUs are going to be pitched in terms of their performance and pricing. But the hope is that if there are a few of them, one might be a high-end model, like a Battlemage B770 to fall in line with the last-gen Alchemist A770 flagship.

As Gawroński theorizes, in terms of the frame rates such a top-end Battlemage GPU might be able to reach, it could be competitive with the NVIDIA RTX 4070 or even the Super version of that graphics card. So, it might prove to be at least close to a rival for the RTX 5070 - especially if priced right - or certainly NVIDIA's RTX 5060 models.

We're getting ahead of ourselves here, but it is interesting to see clues that Intel could have a fair bit more planned for Battlemage.

After all, the initial GPUs from this new generation, the B580 and B570, have been very well-received, so perhaps Team Blue will feel that it's worth pushing harder with discrete desktop GPUs.

Gawroński also spotted a mention of Intel's next-gen discrete GPUs, Celestial, indicating that these 3rd-gen graphics cards may already be in the pipeline.

We've already seen that Celestial integrated graphics are underway, but this is the first hint that desktop GPUs are, as well (as far as we're aware, anyway).