Intel Arc B770 was a no-show at CES 2026
Intel’s product keynote was surprisingly more consumer-oriented than NVIDIA’s and AMD’s. However, the announcement focused almost entirely on Panther Lake. Intel is betting heavily on the success of its new Core Ultra Series 3 (or Ultra 300, if you prefer), which is set to launch later this month.
While Panther Lake brings a major update to Intel’s graphics architecture, there was no update on the long-rumored BMG-G31 GPU, supposedly launching as the Arc B770 desktop graphics card. Intel was directly asked about this GPU in an interview with Digital Foundry. Intel Fellow Tom Petersen answered by saying Intel does not comment on unreleased products, so nothing new was shared.
Source: Reddit
Meanwhile, it looks like one of the OEMs present at CES 2026 contributed to a small leak. Somebody reportedly traced a driver package hosted on one of the HP test machines. The file is available for download, and it includes unreleased firmware for the BMG-G31 GPU. In other words, the consumer GPU driver already has partial support for the new GPU.
The main question is why Intel has not announced the new card. Some believe Panther Lake is too important to be overshadowed by a discrete GPU that may or may not be as successful. Others think the BMG-G31 card uses Xe2 graphics while Intel is already talking about Xe3, so there is not much reason to highlight a last-generation architecture right now. A third possibility is that there is no release date set. Still, that did not stop Intel from announcing many data-center accelerators in the past, sometimes canceling them later.
Still, let’s stay positive and keep waiting for a new Battlemage card. In a few days, it will be a year since the last consumer Battlemage GPU release (Arc B570), and it’s wild to think we have waited this long for an update to the series. But we are still waiting.
Source: Reddit, Haze
