Intel recently issued a series of patches, primarily for its yet unreleased ARC Battlemage GPU series. As per the notes, the patches have removed support for Ultra-High BitRate (UHBR) 20 Gbps and replaced it with support for UHBR13.5 which, as the designation suggests, caps the bitrate at just 13.5 Gbps.
For context, DisplayPort 2.1 outlines three transmission rates: UHBR10, UHBR13.5, and UHBR20. 10 Gbps is the bare minimum and is already being used in DisplayPort 1.4 specs, while the other two are optional and require the use of different cable specs known as DP80.
Battlemage notwithstanding, DisplayPort 2.1 is already supported on AMD’s Radeon 7000 Series GPUs, but one of the main problems here is that, while supported, there are only a handful of monitors that even support the full-fat 20 Gbps speed, let alone 13.5 Gbps.
Intel’s ARC Battlemage is the successor of its current Alchemist GPU lineup and it is rumoured to be on par with NVIDIA’s own high-end GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs. This is in contrast to the Alchemist lineup – the top-tier A770 was only on par with the RTX 3070, while the A750 was designed to go up against the RTX 3060 Ti, at best.
Semantics aside, Intel’s ARC Battlemage lineup is expected to launch later this year, with the most recent rumours suggesting that it could launch on Black Friday, which is 29 November 2024. Again, it’s likely to see stiff competition from the Green GPU maker, given that that is also when its highly anticipated Blackwell RTX Series GPUs are also expected to launch.
(Source: Phoronix, Videocardz)
