Intel updates Arc graphics driver with 'gaming support' for the GPU gamers aren't getting

Intel has released its latest driver dump for Arc graphics cards. And the most notable unsurprisingly-surprising update involves the new Intel Arc Pro B70 and Intel Arc Pro B65 GPUs. Intel says the driver has been updated not just to support those GPUs but to introduce "Gaming Support" specifically.

Of course, as far as we understand the G31 GPU at the heart of the Intel Arc Pro B70 was indeed originally designed for gaming. Since forever, there have been rumours of an Intel Arc B770 card based on G31. But by the time Intel managed to wheel G31 out to market, the world had changed pretty dramatically, what with the AI-fuelled memory crisis among other factors.

In the end, Intel specced the Arc Pro B70 with 32 GB of VRAM, far more than you'd ever need for gaming on any vaguely affordable graphics card, priced it up near $1,000 and pitched it at people wanting to run local AI models who otherwise might have bought more expensive Nvidia GPUs, like the RTX Pro 4000 Blackwell which costs around $1,800 but only offers 24 GB of memory.

Exactly how much time and effort Intel has put into polishing the B70's gaming performance isn't clear. Much of the work would in any case overlap with driver optimisations carried out for actual gaming graphics cards based on the same Intel Xe2 graphics architecture, such as the Intel Arc B580 and its G21 GPU.

But presumably there are at least some tweaks that would be needed for this much larger GPU. Where the B580's G21 GPU has 20 Xe2-spec GPU cores and a 192-bit bus, G31 steps that up to 32 Xe2 cores running over a 256-bit bus.

That makes the G31 GPU over 50% more powerful on paper. The only problem is that even that hefty performance delta probably isn't enough to have it deliver on expectations of RTX 4070 to RTX 5070 levels of performance for the Arc B770.

Even with some decent improvements in driver quality over time for the Arc B580, the RTX 5070 averages out at more like 85% faster across a suite of games. Even a theoretical best-case perfect scaling scenario with the extra Xe2 cores wouldn't have G31 matching an RTX 5070 in games. I suppose someone will run the numbers soon enough and we'll find out for sure.

But G31 is also a fairly large GPU at 378 mm². That compares with the GPU in the RTX 5070, GB205, which comes in at a much smaller 263 mm². So, the G32 chip is likely much more expensive to make. But slower.

In other words, you can see how the idea of an Arc B770 gaming board didn't add up and Intel decided to make the G31 exclusively for AI bods. It's still a pity. But I guess it just wasn't meant to be.