Back when Intel announced its plans to step into the graphics card battlefield, the PC community waited with bated breath for Team Blue’s first-generation Alchemist GPUs. Unfortunately, the cards were plagued by major driver issues and ended up gathering a lot of notoriety following their release.

However, most of the deal-breaking bugs and glitches have been patched by now, and having tested an Arc A750 recently, I was quite amazed by its capabilities. In fact, I eagerly await the release of the upcoming Battlemage graphics cards more than Nvidia’s RTX 5000 series, and here are three reasons why you should, too!

3 Battlemage is our only hope for affordable entry-level graphics cards

If past data is anything to go by, Nvidia's GPUs will come with overinflated price tags

The prices of graphics cards have already broken past the danger zone and are currently in the exorbitant category. With Nvidia going full throttle on AI and ray tracing, the company has consistently bumped up the price tags on its GPUs over the last decade. As someone who has primarily been on Team Green’s side since the days of the GTX 700 series, I find it quite surprising to see a mere graphics card cost more than the PC I built a decade ago.

Take the Ada Lovelace series’ starting price, for instance. Leaving aside the laptop-exclusive RTX 4050 (which is a story for another time), the RTX 4060 was priced at $299 at the time of its launch. Even without the limited VRAM, that’s still $100 too much for a GPU that has a lower bus width and memory bandwidth than its predecessor.

Intel GPUs, despite their faults, are more geared for entry-level and budget users, and the prices reflect that notion. The Arc A310 has an MSRP of $110, making it a solid budget GPU if you’re looking for a replacement or just want a semi-capable card that’s better than an iGPU. And that’s before we include the non-gaming workloads, which I’ll get to in a bit.

2 Higher VRAM on budget cards

Let's hope Nvidia doesn't release VRAM-starved offerings this gen

Nvidia restricting the VRAM on RTX 4060 (and even other GPUs except the 4090) was a terrible move on the company’s part, especially considering that the RTX 3060 had a 12GB variant. Not to mention, the RTX 4060 Ti has two models, with the cheaper one possessing a meager 8GB of VRAM. Yes, I used the comparative term “cheaper” instead of calling it affordable, because the GPU has an MSRP of $399! So, your only option is to go for the more expensive $499 variant if you want a Team Green GPU that has more than 8GB of video memory.

Meanwhile, Intel’s Arc A770 model costs $349 for the 16GB VRAM variant, and the difference of $150 is quite a huge margin. With that out of the way, I’ll hop on a train of speculation for a bit. The rumor mill states that the RTX 5090 will ship with anywhere between 24-32GB of Video RAM. The slightly weaker GB203 chip, which is assumed to be the 5080, will possess half as much memory, or 12-16GB of VRAM. Considering that the RTX 4080 also has 16GB of video memory, that doesn’t bode well for the budget-oriented (if you can even call them that) GPUs from Team Green. If Nvidia doesn’t learn its lesson from the terrible reception of the RTX 4060, then we might be stuck at 8GB of VRAM in the 5060 as well.

1 Intel Arc GPUs have an amazing price-to-performance ratio

Especially for non-gaming workloads

Although I’d advise hardcore gamers to remain on Team Green’s side, Intel’s Arc series offers significantly higher performance per dollar. For example, the Arc A310 has enough horsepower to add rock-solid AV1 transcoding to any old PC. What’s more, the GPU is more than capable of light gaming at 1080p, and we’re talking about a mere $110 price tag.

Heck, even my Arc A750 maintained around 60FPS on most titles at 1440p once I’d enabled the Resizable BAR facility on my motherboard. Given how the Battlemage series is rumored to switch from a 6nm to a 4nm manufacturing process, we’re bound to see some improvements in clock speeds across the new lineup. Plus, Team Blue is reportedly dialing the Xe core count on all but the flagship BMG-G31 SKU, meaning the cheaper options should boast even more firepower.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows for Intel GPU lovers, though

While I’m really excited about the upcoming Intel Battlemage family, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried. Quite the opposite, actually, because Team Blue is still (pardon the pun) a greenhorn in the discrete desktop GPU department. I’d be surprised if the company manages to release fully functioning drivers at the time of Battlemage’s launch. That said, things are far worse when it comes to the RTX 5000 series.

Now that AMD is supposedly detracting from the high-end GPU market, I’m low-key dreading the release of Nvidia’s Blackwell generation. With its key competitor out of the picture and Intel relegating the Battlemage series to budget graphics cards, Team Green is free to slap even higher price labels on its flagship offerings – which is far more terrible than broken drivers on Intel’s upcoming GPU family.