Intel enters a new “Battle” with Arc B580 & B570 GPUs
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Ding, Ding, Round 2!
The long expected reveal of Intel’s 2nd generation discrete GPU’s came as planned. Following a strong but troubled hat toss into the PC gaming graphics market with their Arc range of cards in 2022. In the passing 2 years they have moved up the target specs and performance with the new cards being the top tier of Intel’s gaming GPU’s, targeting the most competitive entry/mid range segment. They target the sweet spot of 1440p high refresh and ultra quality graphics, complete with Ray Tracing and hardware accelerated upscaling, in their proprietary XeSS AI upscaler. Which has become a baseline requirement now as I discussed many moons ago.
The announcement was joined with some key game tests across the cards they are aiming to exceed and outprice in the other two kings of the market, AMD and the undisputed champion Nvidia, with their RX7600 and RTX4060 mid range cards respectively. From their own selection of, I am sure hand picked titles, the new big boy B580 is 32% faster in rasterisation and 25% faster in Ray Tracing over the biggest card on the market the RTX4060. And come with 12 or 10GBs of GDDR6 ram as opposed to the 8GBs of that card. Which is likely some of the reason we are seeing quite a large delta on aggregate.
The power is only part of the sell here though, with Intel claiming the best price to performance class in the market. And a bold statement for sure, backed up, in the select titles used mind, in the game performance metrics. A big part of the success here though is Intel have delivered a forward looking architecture that comes with their own AI powered upscaling and latency reduction software/hardware combination. Which now includes XeSS frame generation completing the software stack of all its competitors. Now in their 2nd generation with XeSS 2, which will be a very interesting test to compare against DLSS, FSR3 and even the PS5 Pro’s PSSR. Based on their PR pack, the latency reduction can be up to 45% faster in F1 24, a great starting point for sure.
Even over their own previous card, Intel claim up to 70% faster performance per Xe core, and improve power use by 50% which is likely the largest reason for the increase on a newer, smaller, more power efficient node. The two cards are very close, sharing the same design with the B570 having a small reduction in Vram, now 10GB, 18 Xe cores rather than 20 and a lower power threshold of 150w versus 190. The full revealed specs can be seen below in the table.
As the old saying goes though, the proof is in the pudding. But Intel have kept board partners in the game, with a good selection of players having cards coming alongside their own Reference spec cards. In Asus, Asrock, Sparkle (a blast from the TnT2 past days) and more. As usual expect these to have even better performance, cooling and design but be within the quoted specs. The cards will ship on December 13th for the B580, and January 16th for the B570. Priced at $249 and $219 respectively and assume slightly higher in £s or Euros here in Europe. The question mark remains on just what Nvidia have cooking in their RTX50 series of cards rumoured to be revealed next month at CES 25, and AMD’s RDNA4 RX80 series also due early 2025. The battle is well and truly on, stay tuned for in-depth coverage coming soon.
