Introduction
The ASRock Arc B580 Steel Legend is the company’s premium custom design take on Intel’s newest performance segment GPU, the B580 Battlemage. The Steel Legend brand represents a balance of rugged industrial build quality, and cost. In ASRock’s stack of graphics cards and motherboards, it’s positioned a notch below the Phantom Gaming series, but a notch above Challenger. The company is also launching the Arc B580 Challenger today. The Arc B580 heralds Intel’s second generation of Xe branded discrete gaming GPUs. These are contemporary, meet DirectX 12 Ultimate API requirements, and come with a comprehensive set of gaming experience enhancements under the XeSS 2 feature suite.
The new Xe2 Battlemage graphics architecture debuted with the iGPU solution of Intel’s Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake mobile processor, but a more specialized version of this launches today with the B580, and its value sibling, the B570. The B580 logically follows the A580, a barely 1080p-capable graphics card. However, the B580 offers a significant performance improvement. It boasts a 70% increase in SIMD performance due to its architecture. Additionally, the 5 nm process contributes to a 50% boost in performance-per-watt. As a result, the B580 outperforms all models in the Arc A-series Alchemist generation, including the flagship A770.
At its starting price of $250, the B580 is positioned more logically against the RTX 4060 and AMD’s Radeon RX 7600 and RX 7600 XT, than the awkward placement the A580 had, against the RTX 3050. Battlemage promises not just a generational gain in raster 3D performance, but the company worked to significantly boost the ray tracing units, adding anywhere between 50% to 100% gains in performance for the various ray tracing workloads. This, along with XeSS 2, reduces the performance cost of ray tracing.
XeSS 2 is a collection of three features, XeSS Super Resolution (XeSS SR), which is the original XeSS from the Arc A-series; the new XeSS Frame Generation (XeSS FG), which is a new AI-based frame rate doubling technology; and Xe Low Latency (XeLL), a feature that counteracts the system latency imposed by ray tracing, XeSS SR, and XeSS FG. XeLL can work as a standalone feature, too. Intel also introduced driver-based latency reduction, which works on any game without Xe-specific optimization.
The Arc B580 is based on the 5 nm BMG-G21 silicon, and comes with 20 Xe2 cores, worth 128 execution units, or 2,560 unified shaders. There are also 160 XMX cores, 20 Ray Tracing Units, and a solid raster 3D machinery consisting of 80 ROPs, and 160 TMUs. The memory sub-system features a large 18 MB last-level cache on the GPU, and 12 GB of 19 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit memory interface, for 50% more memory bandwidth than both the RTX 4060 and the RX 7600 XT. The GPU also comes with two sets of hardware video encoders and decoders, and a modern display I/O, including DisplayPort 2.1 UHBR 13.5, which should draw some attention from creative professionals.
The ASRock B580 Steel Legend looks like it’s from a segment above. It’s currently listed for $270 on Newegg, which is a $20 increase over the Intel reference card price point. You’re getting a large triple-slot cooling solution, and a PCB with two 8-pin power connectors instead of one. The B580 comes with a default board power limit of 190 W, and so although the reference-design card comes with just one connector, the second one could come handy with overclocking, and to contain any spikes in power draw.
| Price | Cores | ROPs | Core Clock | Boost Clock | Memory Clock | GPU | Transistors | Memory | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RX 6500 XT | $140 | 1024 | 32 | 2685 MHz | 2825 MHz | 2248 MHz | Navi 24 | 5400M | 4 GB, GDDR6, 64-bit |
| Arc A580 | $180 | 3072 | 96 | 1700 MHz | N/A | 2000 MHz | ACM-G10 | 21700M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RTX 3050 | $165 | 2560 | 32 | 1552 MHz | 1777 MHz | 1750 MHz | GA106 | 12000M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit |
| Arc A750 | $220 | 3584 | 112 | 2050 MHz | N/A | 2000 MHz | ACM-G10 | 21700M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RX 6600 XT | $205 | 2048 | 64 | 2359 MHz | 2589 MHz | 2000 MHz | Navi 23 | 11060M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit |
| RTX 3060 | $220 | 3584 | 48 | 1320 MHz | 1777 MHz | 1875 MHz | GA106 | 12000M | 12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit |
| RX 7600 | $250 | 2048 | 64 | 2250 MHz | 2625 MHz | 2250 MHz | Navi 33 | 13300M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit |
| RX 7600 XT | $310 | 2048 | 64 | 2470 MHz | 2755 MHz | 2250 MHz | Navi 33 | 13300M | 16 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit |
| RTX 4060 | $285 | 3072 | 48 | 1830 MHz | 2460 MHz | 2125 MHz | AD107 | 18900M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit |
| Arc A770 | $250 | 4096 | 128 | 2100 MHz | N/A | 2187 MHz | ACM-G10 | 21700M | 16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| Arc B580 | $250 | 2560 | 80 | 2670 MHz | N/A | 2375 MHz | BMG-G21 | 19600M | 12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit |
| ASRock Arc B580 Steel Legend OC | $270 | 2560 | 80 | 2800 MHz | N/A | 2375 MHz | BMG-G21 | 19600M | 12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit |
| RTX 3060 Ti | $300 | 4864 | 80 | 1410 MHz | 1665 MHz | 1750 MHz | GA104 | 17400M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RTX 4060 Ti | $380 | 4352 | 48 | 2310 MHz | 2535 MHz | 2250 MHz | AD106 | 22900M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit |
| RX 6700 XT | $350 | 2560 | 64 | 2424 MHz | 2581 MHz | 2000 MHz | Navi 22 | 17200M | 12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit |
| RTX 3070 | $320 | 5888 | 96 | 1500 MHz | 1725 MHz | 1750 MHz | GA104 | 17400M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RTX 3070 Ti | $370 | 6144 | 96 | 1575 MHz | 1770 MHz | 1188 MHz | GA104 | 17400M | 8 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit |
| RX 6800 | $340 | 3840 | 96 | 1815 MHz | 2105 MHz | 2000 MHz | Navi 21 | 26800M | 16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RX 7700 XT | $370 | 3456 | 96 | 2171 MHz | 2544 MHz | 2250 MHz | Navi 32 | 26500M | 12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit |
| RX 6800 XT | $400 | 4608 | 128 | 2015 MHz | 2250 MHz | 2000 MHz | Navi 21 | 26800M | 16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |