Intel currently has a zero percent market share of desktop graphics cards, according to Jon Peddie Research. And that’s hardly the company’s only issue — a few years of bad news was capped off by kissing the ring and giving a 10 percent stake to the US government. But the latest Arc GPU has given me a tiny sliver of hope that someone will step up to Nvidia’s monopoly.
It’s the Arc Pro B50, and before you say anything, yes, this is an industrial GPU not meant for gamers. But the lower-priced alternative to the B60 shows that the company hasn’t given up on Battlemage, Intel’s second-gen discrete graphics architecture. The $350, low-profile card doesn’t require a dedicated power rail, despite some neat tricks like PCIe 5. This one’s packing 16GB of video memory, 16 Xe cores, and 16 ray tracing units, four fewer than the B60 in each category, and 224GB/s of memory.
Again, this $350 card isn’t meant for gamers. It’s surely capable of gaming, like the surprisingly good Arc consumer cards released late last year. But its intended purpose is for industrial users who want to do a bunch of rendering or AI computing with relatively lower cost and power requirements. Unlike the B60, this one’s going out to at least some reviewers like HardwareLuxx and Igor’s Lab. Which means someone at Intel is interested in actually getting this thing out to customers.
Nvidia’s in-demand RTX 50-series cards are finally getting to a point where you can buy one, assuming that you can afford one. But the company is so dominant that AMD has basically abandoned the top end of the market, and offerings below the $300 USD mark are leaving a lot to be desired. Almost three years after the first Arc cards debuted, the desktop GPU market still needs a shakeup…and Intel still needs something positive to grow on.