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Intel Arc B580 Review – Excellent Value

Introduction

Intel Logo

The release of Intel’s Arc B580 graphics cards heralds two pieces of good news—first, it’s the 2nd generation Xe Battlemage graphics architecture; and second, that Intel is here to stay in the PC gaming graphics hardware industry. This is important, because for all the gloom that’s associated with Intel these days, the company remains one of Silicon Valley’s tallest giants, holds the vast majority of the PC and server processor markets, and IP invented or acquired over a period of half a century. If there’s anyone that can keep both NVIDIA and AMD on notice, and spring surprises, it’s Intel. The company’s first-gen Xe Alchemist architecture may not have unseated the incumbents, but Intel demonstrated capability in engineering a modern discrete GPU that meets the latest DirectX 12 Ultimate API, including a sophisticated ray tracing hardware pipeline, and a robust software backend.

With Battlemage, things are only heating up—Intel claims 70% generational increases in SIMD performance of its Xe cores, and a 50% increase in performance-per-watt, due in part to the switch to 5 nm EUV foundry node. This has allowed the company to debut the architecture with the Arc B580, which succeeds the mid-range A580, and not the company’s flagship A770. The B580 is claimed by Intel to be faster than most of the Arc A-series, including the A750.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Arc B580 launch is its price of $250, and the fact that Intel is positioning it against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 and the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT. If you turn the clocks back to 2022, the top A770 and A750 were only compared to the RTX 3060, nothing faster, and so the B580 being compared to the RTX 4060 at a $50 (15%) lower price means that Intel wants to gun for market share against NVIDIA’s most popular SKU from its current GeForce Ada Lovelace generation. NVIDIA is rumored to launch the successor to the RTX 4060 only by March 2025, which means Intel has headroom in which to grab some sales away from the RTX 4060 and the RX 7600/7600 XT.

The Arc B580 is based on the 5 nm BMG-G21 silicon, and comes with 20 Xe2 cores, for 128 execution units, or 2,560 unified shaders. There are also 20 Ray Tracing Units, and 160 XMX matrix accelerators. For a mid-range SKU, Intel has given the B580 some solid raster 3D chops, with 160 TMUs, and 80 ROPs. You get 12 GB of 19 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit memory bus, which offers nearly 50% more memory bandwidth than the memory interfaces of the RTX 4060 and the RX 7600 XT.

Battlemage introduces the new Xe2 Core, with large generational improvements in compute performance, and Intel studied the nuts and bolts of the graphics rendering pipeline through its sales and software-side long-term support of the Arc A-series, to identify key areas of improvement in its hardware. The Ray Tracing Unit of Battlemage gets special attention, with a 50-100% boost in performance of specific areas of the ray tracing stack. This works to reduce the overhead of ray tracing on the SIMD units and the CPU, and the overall performance cost of ray tracing.

Intel also introduced XeSS 2, which is a collection of three technologies—XeSS SR (super resolution), the new XeSS FG (frame generation), and XeLL (latency reduction technology). XeSS FG nearly doubles frame rates, and when combined with XeSS SR and XeLL, should significantly uplift the capability of the B580 from being a mid-range product, if you know your way around settings. There’s also a driver-based low latency mode that works on any game, even if it’s not explicitly optimized for XeSS 2.

In this review, we have with us the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition, a reference-design product which will be sold directly by Intel (just like its processors). This is a modest $250 graphics card, yet Intel made great effort to make the product design stand out. It is strictly 2 slots-thick, and needs no more than one 8-pin PCI power connector. Tomorrow we will have additional reviews of partner design cards for the B580.

Intel Arc B580 Market Segment Analysis
 PriceCoresROPsCore
Clock
Boost
Clock
Memory
Clock
GPUTransistorsMemory
RX 6500 XT$1401024322685 MHz2825 MHz2248 MHzNavi 245400M4 GB, GDDR6, 64-bit
Arc A580$1803072961700 MHzN/A2000 MHzACM-G1021700M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3050$1652560321552 MHz1777 MHz1750 MHzGA10612000M8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
Arc A750$22035841122050 MHzN/A2000 MHzACM-G1021700M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6600 XT$2052048642359 MHz2589 MHz2000 MHzNavi 2311060M8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RTX 3060$2203584481320 MHz1777 MHz1875 MHzGA10612000M12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RX 7600$2502048642250 MHz2625 MHz2250 MHzNavi 3313300M8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RX 7600 XT$3102048642470 MHz2755 MHz2250 MHzNavi 3313300M16 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RTX 4060$2853072481830 MHz2460 MHz2125 MHzAD10718900M8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
Arc A770$25040961282100 MHzN/A2187 MHzACM-G1021700M16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Arc B580$2502560802670 MHzN/A2375 MHzBMG-G2119600M12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 3060 Ti$3004864801410 MHz1665 MHz1750 MHzGA10417400M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 4060 Ti$3804352482310 MHz2535 MHz2250 MHzAD10622900M8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RX 6700 XT$3502560642424 MHz2581 MHz2000 MHzNavi 2217200M12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 3070$3205888961500 MHz1725 MHz1750 MHzGA10417400M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3070 Ti$3706144961575 MHz1770 MHz1188 MHzGA10417400M8 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RX 6800$3403840961815 MHz2105 MHz2000 MHzNavi 2126800M16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 7700 XT$3703456962171 MHz2544 MHz2250 MHzNavi 3226500M12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RX 6800 XT$40046081282015 MHz2250 MHz2000 MHzNavi 2126800M16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit