Intel Arc B580 review: the fastest mainstream GPU – and 12GB of VRAM is the cherry on top
The review embargo lifts today for Intel’s Arc B580 graphics card – the firm’s second generation GPU architecture, fully supporting hardware-accelerated machine learning and ray tracing. Intel is aiming squarely at the budget gamer with the $250 Arc B580, promising 12GB of VRAM and average performance that is, according to its own benchmarks, around 10 percent faster on average than the market leader: Nvidia’s more expensive RTX 4060 8GB. A B570 is following in January, with a mild haircut to shaders, bandwidth and VRAM (10GB), with a mooted $220 price-point.
We were sent the Arc B580 last week and it’s an impressive piece of kit. The limited edition reference card is well-built, totally quiet in operation and requires just one PCI-e eight-pin power input, with general operation seeing power draw around 170-180W at most. Display outputs are the standard trio of DisplayPorts, backed by an HDMI 2.1 output. In common with prior Arcs, HDMI seems to have some issues with capture cards – frustrating for our workflow, but surmountable with a DisplayPort to HDMI cable.
So why is there no full-blooded, multi-page Eurogamer review? Owing to some fundamental changes to our benchmarking set-up, we can’t bring you our usual array of figures – a tech upgrade is needed behind the scenes on the Eurogamer CMS. However, our video workflow is functional, so I do encourage you to watch the video embedded below. You’ll get some idea of we are updating our benchmarking system in the first place (more data, more games, more holistic testing) but more importantly, you’ll get to see Arc B580 in action – and it’s good!
| Arc B580 | Arc B570 | |
|---|---|---|
| Xe Cores | 20 | 18 |
| Render Slices | 5 | 5 |
| RT Units | 20 | 18 |
| XMX AI Engines | 160 | 144 |
| Graphics Clock | 2670MHz | 2500MHz |
| Memory | 12GB | 10GB |
| Memory Interface | 192-bit | 160-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 456GB/s | 380GB/s |
| Peak TOPs | 233 | 203 |
| Total Board Power | 190W | 150W |
Ray tracing performance is the high point in the grand battle against RTX 4060. In Alan Wake 2 at high settings with low RT (the only setting that doesn’t use path tracing), you’re getting reflections and transparency reflections that exceed the quality on the PS5 Pro version. At native 1080p, B580 beats RTX 4060 by 29 percent and it’s 51 points clear of the RX 7600, though it does have some stutter that Nvidia does not. Dying Light 2 at the same resolution is 14 percent ahead of Nvidia, 51 points clear of AMD, while Metro Exodus on extreme settings blitzes the competition: 16 percent ahead of RTX 4060, surpassing RX 7600 with a 77 percent advantage. It’s not all plain sailing for Intel – the performance gap drops in Avatar, but generally, RT is the highlight.
