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It’s not exactly being translated, but there is a hint of Intel’s new Battlemage. GPUs Being placed in what should have been a generation of alchemists. Those They finally grew to their PCIe slotsBut only after months of dial-in driver updates – the flagship B580 promises to keep Nvidia’s best games from crashing. Although at this stage in the current generation of graphics (GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 could be revealed live at CES 2025 tonight), there is something enticing about this idea.
Obviously, the B580 will no doubt be no match for the RTX 5090 or 5080, which will undoubtedly cost the same amount of Faberge eggs as it takes to make an unpleasantly spiky wedding cake. Instead, and despite Intel touting it as a 1440p machine, the B580 is more than 1080p-bopping. RTX 4060 rival. Here in the UK the pricing range is dead even with Nvidia’s GPU, with the cheapest starting at £270 and Intel’s own limited edition (on test here) at £300. State-wise, it’s even cheaper, with the limited edition asking for just $260 while most RTX 4060 models are around $300.
That forty-forty dollars less than the 4060, the B580 packs 12GB of GDDR6 and pays for 4GB more VRAM. He still asks Changeable BAR To be fair, however, Battlemage’s architecture targets many of Alchemist’s weaknesses; Radiation detection Cores and no longer looks at DirectX 9 games with such a look of hatred and fear. It all looks lovely – lord knows the world can be made with cheaper GPUs. AMD Radeon 7600kind of pointless.
Intel Arc B580 review: 1440p specs
In actual gaming, however, getting the most out of the Arc B580 isn’t as simple as slapping on a ReBAR. First, at Intel’s preferred 2560×1440, it performed somewhat decent-ish when paired with the RPS test rig’s Core i5-11600K. Except for modest single-digit frame gains in the Metro Exodus And F1 2022it performs about the same as the nearly two-year-old RTX 4060, even with all that bonus memory.
Thing is, I’ve wanted to update our GPU benchmarking process for ages, with most of these games either being replaced by successors or getting in the teeth up to the i5-11600K itself. So I decided to stop killing it and try a refurbished system, with new games and a PC based around a Core i9-13900K. Less representative of the majority CPU, perhaps, but it should be more prone to throttling than the old i5.
With this young, fast processor to lose, the B580 turned its graphics performance into a clean sweep with the RTX 4060.
Check it out with 3fps upwards shooting behind it. Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Granted, with separate anti-aliasing) to 12fps ahead. And in Metro Exodus, the RTX 4060 didn’t benefit from the CPU upgrade, but the Arc B580 claimed another 5fps.
Unlike the Radeon 7600, and most AMD GPUs for that matter, the B580 can give Nvidia a run for its money in radio detection. to run Cyberpunk 2077 With the upgraded rig’s psycho-level RT effects and high resolution enhancement, the Arc B580 averaged 39fps with XeSS – dead even with the RTX 4060 using DLSS. Running ultra-high-resolution ray tracing in Metro Exodus also saw the Arch B850 take the lead, scoring 52fps to the RTX 4060’s 43fps. And that was without any enhancing help.
Intel Arch B580 review: 1080p benchmarks
Still not sure if the Arc B580 Intel says is the 1440p array – obviously. able At that resolution, however, it’s just barely brushing 60fps in newer games, and for an extra £70 or so you’ll get the faster RTX 4060 Ti. Down at 1080p, on the other hand, everything is smooth, even though the RTX 4060 is usually faster on the older test rig.
With the Core i9-13900K, though, it’s another win for Battlemage, pulling out several double-digit leads over the RTX 4060 and lagging slightly behind in Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
Again, there wasn’t a lot of daylight between the two in the ray-labeled Cyberpunk 2077 test – the Arc B580 got 58fps, the RTX 4060 got 59fps – and the Ultra RT remained the fastest Intel GPU enabled in Metro Exodus, averaging 149fps to the GeForce’s 142fps. As the F1 2024’s Ultra High Preset also enables ray tracing by default, the Arc B580 shows that it can handle the added pressure without stuttering.
Even if you’re not an active part-buyer and want to see something get away from one-party territory with current graphics cards, there’s a lot of good stuff here. Nvidia isn’t the only manufacturer that does ray tracing well, and it certainly can’t claim to make the fastest sub-300-pound card of the current generation – at native rez, anyway. Even the RTX 4060’s excellent power efficiency isn’t unscathed: the Arc B580 looks like the loser here, with a 190W power draw rating and 600W PSU rating that falls short of the 4060’s 115W rating and 550W rating. In practice, however, the B580’s graphics only peaked at 118W, beating the 126W I saw on the 4060. The Nvidia rival hovered around 69-74°c.
Good thing like me. However, the Arc B580’s reliance on CPU brawn also means that personal visualization is more practical than a typical bar graph comparison. Is this card better off using the latest CPU tech to get the performance advantage, or is it really the same way that more expensive chips do for starters on older PCs?
Honestly, I think it’s a bit of both. Considering that cheap graphics cards naturally make their way into aging desktops, the Arch B580’s best capabilities are certainly not ideal for upgrading another relatively expensive component to closely match. At the same time, it’s not like there’s a set-in-stone requirement for the new Core i9. My previous CPU testing suggests that the i9-13900K is actually not that much faster than the mid-range Core i5-13600K, which itself is slightly faster than the Core i5-12600K. In other words, the Arc B580 might get away with an older PC setup, but anyone who’s updated in the last few years will probably be fine.
It’s not just ray tracing that Intel is up to. It’s currently released and only works in F1 24, but XeSS 2 – the latest version of DLSS-like upscaling technology – gives the Arc B580 another tool to upscale frames. So far, XeSS 2 seems to be a match for DLSS in terms of overall visual quality – the most successful, AMD FSR has been trying and failing for years – and the new frame generation component also does an impressive job of rendering. DLSS 3Adding smoothness generated by AI. Beating it, even. That 45fps rose to 80fps at 1440p in XeSS 2 and from 56fps to 102fps at 1080p, in both cases higher than the 57fps and 77fps the RTX 4060 produced in DLSS 3.
Again, AMD tried something very similar FSR 3But XeSS 2 seems to produce better looking results without adding much input lag. I’d love to try XeSS 2 with something a little more gamepad-controlled racing, but F1 24’s showing so far is encouraging.
The catch, mind, is that DLSS 3 has a big head start on game support, with over 100 games currently available and dozens more on the way. It’s hard to see XeSS 2 catching up, which means DLSS 3 remains a more valuable feature – and that value carries over to GPUs that support it, including the RTX 4060.
So, the Arc B580 won’t make the RTX 4060 obsolete. It’s also a safer bet for 1080p rigs that are already using CPUs, since Nvidia doesn’t have much to gain from the new chips. It tells us that it doesn’t lose that much with old chips either.
Conversely, for all new builds (or non-GPU refurbished PCs), the Arch B580 is a legitimate option. Arguably even better, in fact, if you can live without the added flavor of fram gin. In addition to fixing Alchemist’s beam-tracing weakness and making everything more stable – I didn’t experience any crashes with the Arc A750 – the Battlemage architecture has produced a peppy, affordable GPU that’s more than enough for sloppy 1080p. And it doesn’t even need twenty driver updates to get there.
This rating is based on the retail unit provided by the manufacturer.
