Intel announces its new Battlemage graphics cards, and they might just be the 1440p budget champions we've been waiting for

Intel officially announced its latest discrete graphics cards on this week, the Intel Arc B580 and Intel Arc B570, based on its next-gen Xe2 graphics architecture.

Targeting the budget gaming segment, the new flagship Intel Arc B580 GPU features 20 Xe-cores, 20 ray tracing units, 160 XMX AI Engines and 12GB GDDR6 memory with a 192-bit memory interface, specs that could make it a very competitive 1440p graphics card.

The Intel Arc B570, meanwhile, features 18 Xe-cores, 18 ray tracing units, 144 XMX AI Engines, and 10GB GDDR6 memory with a 160-bit memory interface. And while this is less than the Arc B580, it is more memory bandwidth than the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti and AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT, both of which struggled when it came to 1440p gaming in gaming benchmarks due to their constrained memory bandwidth.

What might be even more compelling for gamers right now, though ...