Today, the review ban was lifted on Intel's Arc B580 graphics card, the company's second-generation GPU architecture that fully supports hardware-accelerated machine learning and ray tracing. Intel is targeting budget gamers with the $250 Arc B580, which promises 12GB of VRAM and average performance that, according to its own benchmarks, is around 10% faster than market leader Nvidia's more expensive RTX 4060 8GB. The B570 will launch in January with slight tweaks to its shaders, bandwidth, and VRAM (10GB), and is expected to cost $220.
Last week we took delivery of the Arc B580, an impressive piece of kit. The limited edition reference card is well built, completely quiet when running, requires only a PCI-e eight-pin power input, and typically consumes around 170-180W at most when running. Display output is a standard triple display port, supported by HDMI 2.1 output. As with previous Arcs, HDMI seems to have some issues with the capture card – which is frustrating for our workflow, but can be overcome with a DisplayPort to HDMI cable.
So why doesn't Eurogamer have a full, multi-page review? We're unable to provide you with the usual range of data due to some fundamental changes to our benchmark setup – a technical upgrade is required behind the scenes at Eurogamer CMS. However, our video workflow works, so I encourage you to watch the video embedded below. you will get some ideas Why We'll first update our benchmark system (more data, more games, more comprehensive testing), but more importantly, you'll see the Arc B580 in action – which is good!
| Curved B580 | Curved B570 | |
|---|---|---|
| Xe core | 20 | 18 |
| Render slices | 5 | 5 |
| RT unit | 20 | 18 |
| XMX Artificial Intelligence Engine | 160 | 144 |
| graphic clock | 2670 MHz | 2500 MHz |
| memory | 12GB | 10GB |
| memory interface | 192 bits | 160 bits |
| memory bandwidth | 456GB/sec | 380GB/sec |
| Peak TOP | 233 | 203 |
| Total board power | 190W | 150W |
Ray tracing performance is the high point in the battle with the RTX 4060. In Alan Wake 2, at high settings and low RT (the only setting that doesn't use path tracing), you get out-of-quality reflections and transparent reflections on the PS5 Pro version. At native 1080p, the B580 is 29% better than the RTX 4060 and 51 points ahead of the RX 7600, although it does suffer from some stuttering that Nvidia doesn't have. Dying Light 2 at the same resolution leads Nvidia by 14% and AMD by 51 percentage points, while Metro Exodus blitzes the competition at extreme settings: 16% ahead of the RTX 4060 and 77% % advantage over RX 7600. It's not all plain sailing for Intel – the performance gap narrowed a bit in Avatar, but overall, the RT is the highlight.
In terms of rasterization, the RTX 4060 is more competitive with Alan Wake 2 at high settings and looks very similar to the B580. The RX 7600 continues to lead, although AMD and Intel again experience stuttering not seen on Nvidia cards. Meanwhile, Black Myth: Wukong actually saw Nvidia lead by about 9%. What's fascinating about the RTX 4060 is how far behind it is with RT disabled in Cyberpunk 2077, so it's no surprise to see the B580 ahead by 23%. Forza Horizon 5? It's almost evenly matched between Intel and Nvidia, but both cards deliver baseline performance at 1440p, exceeding 60fps at extreme settings. Keep in mind, based on all these results, that the Arc B580 has 12GB VRAM and costs $50 less.
Some problems arose during testing. Intel believes its driver issues are behind this, but I found that the performance of my Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales benchmark (essentially the opening cutscene) varied with and without ray tracing The situation is severely lagging. Cyberpunk 2077 also doesn't work properly using Ultra or Psycho RT, resulting in a hard lock on my computer. Intel says this is an issue when the game runs on the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but this doesn't apply to any other GPU I've tested. Here's the thing: I've only tested a relatively small range of modern games, and if two of them have issues, I can't help but wonder how many more have them.
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Legacy gameplay was always a weak point in the first Arc version, and while my favorite Assassin's Creed Unity has been patched back to good performance, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare has always had issues with its first campaign. Crash during level. I have the same shader compilation issue when using the Arc B580 (compilation takes over 20 minutes on Arc!), only this time I can't even start the campaign without the game crashing.
All in all, the Arc B580 is a dream product in many ways – it's about as disruptive as we've seen in a mature market like PC graphics. We've been complaining about the stagnation of the sub-$300 GPU market for some time now. We've been complaining that 8GB of VRAM isn't enough for a new graphics card that wants to deliver a console-quality experience. We're not satisfied with the meager generation-to-generation performance improvements offered by the RTX 4060 and RX 7600, which are adequate but by no means exciting.
The B580 is priced very aggressively, the price/performance ratio is best in class, ray tracing is very good, and XeSS is very, very good. I'm just worried that support for Intel upgrades isn't as widespread as FSR and DLSS – why, for example no Is Alan Wake 2 supported? XeSS 2 frame generation? In the process of getting our new benchmarking workflow online, I didn't have time to test it, but I'm looking forward to trying it out – Intel promises to have a full AI pipeline there.
But at the same time, the Intel Arc B580 is a very compelling proposition and a shot in the arm for one of the most stagnant segments. Our previous advice for products like this is to buy an RTX 4060 if necessary, or go for the cheaper RTX 3060 since it has 12GB of framebuffer memory. The Arc B580 makes the decision-making process even more challenging. Considering where it comes from, I don't think Intel could come up with a better product. If it weren't for DLSS becoming so ubiquitous and important, this would be a must-buy. Even so, it's still well worth considering.
