Intel's Arc Pro B70 'Big Battlemage' GPU falls behind RTX 5060 Ti in gaming performance

Intel's long-awaited 'Big Battlemage' GPU finally got released this year, albeit in workstation form, with the new Intel Arc Pro B70 32GB graphics card. It's powered by the BMG-G31 silicon that was on track to power a potential Intel Arc B770 desktop PC gaming graphics card, which is no longer coming. As for what the gaming performance of this GPU might have looked like, we now have a more detailed look thanks to a new deep dive from Expreview.

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The outlet tested the Intel Arc Pro B70's gaming performance at 1440p, with and without ray tracing, comparing it to the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB and Intel Arc B580 12GB cards, testing five games in each category. Looking at the overall results, the Intel Arc Pro B70's gaming performance falls short of beating the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB in both categories, with NVIDIA's GPU being around 5% faster on average when it comes to non-ray tracing or rasterized performance, and around 2% faster when it comes to ray-tracing performance.

That said, the two cards do trade blows, with the Intel Arc Pro B70 delivering faster performance in Cyberpunk 2077 in both scenarios, and faster ray-tracing performance on the Intel card in F1 25 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. Here's a closer look at the results.

Intel Arc Pro B70 1440p Gaming Performance without RT (FPS)

Intel Arc Pro B70 1440p Gaming Performance with RT (FPS)

Ultimately, the results do show us that a 'Big Battlemage' gaming GPU would have delivered a notable improvement over the current Intel Arc B580, with the Arc Pro B70 being around 33% faster in non-ray tracing workloads and an impressive 42% faster with ray-tracing enabled.

With the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB GPU delivering performance similar to the previous-gen mid-range GeForce RTX 4070 12GB GPU, these results align with previous rumors that the Intel Arc B770 would have been an RTX 4070 competitor. Even now, if the pricing were competitive with the RTX 5060 Ti, an Intel Arc B770 16GB card could still be an affordable mid-range option for PC gamers. As it stands, the Intel Arc Pro B70 isn't something you'd consider for gaming, as it's priced at $949 and built for local AI.