Intel announces $249 Arc B580 and $219 Arc B570 ‘Battlemage’ graphics cards

Intel’s next — and possibly last — desktop graphics cards will begin arriving in just 10 days. Right on cue, the company has announced the budget $249 Arc B580 and $219 Arc B570, shipping December 13th and January 16th, respectively, as the “best-in-class performance per dollar” options in the GPU market.

They’re based on the same Xe2 “Battlemage” GPU architecture you’ll find in Intel’s Lunar Lake laptop chips but with more than double the graphics cores, up to 12GB of dedicated video memory, and up to 190W of power compared to their limited laptop forms — enough power to see the B580 slightly beat Nvidia’s $299 RTX 4060 and AMD’s $269 RX 7600, according to Intel’s benchmarks, but sometimes still trading blows.

For example, Intel claims the B580 runs 10 percent faster on average than the RTX 4060 in a wide array of games at 1440p and ultra settings, assuming you pair both with Intel’s pricey Core i9-14900K CPU. There, Intel says that combo can break a 60fps average in Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, Returnal, and The Witcher 3 where the 4060 can’t.

And yet the Nvidia card is still ahead in Starfield, Gears 5, and a pair of Assassin’s Creed games (as well as Counter-Strike 2, DOTA 2, and League of Legends, though all cards have plenty of frames there) despite widespread reviewer consensus in 2023 that Nvidia’s RTX 4060 was underpowered and hamstrung. Intel’s really relying on price to sell this one.

Compared to Intel’s previous-gen A750, which originally retailed for $289 but can now be found for $180, the new card runs 24 percent faster on average, according to Intel — but it may again depend on the game. In that test, Intel ran many games with its XeSS AI upscaling turned on, and Baldur’s Gate 3 barely ran faster on the new GPU.

Intel suggests that you can truly see the B580’s clear advantages in situations where its competitors are memory-constrained, as the B580 has 12GB of video memory to the 4060’s 8GB. One example: in Forza Motorsport, the Nvidia card apparently beats the Intel one 86fps to 77fps, but Intel wins 64fps to 57fps when you turn on ray tracing.

Intel didn’t offer individual comparisons to the AMD RX 7600 or any comparisons whatsoever against the new Arc B570.

Intel will sell its own Arc B580 Limited Edition card with two fans, a single 8-pin power connector, and “whisper quiet” performance; Acer, ASRock, Gunnir, Sparkle, Maxsun, and Onix will sell versions as well.

It’s refreshing to see video cards come in at lower price points with more memory and memory bandwidth than the competition, but the GPU market has a tendency to self-correct pricing quickly, and Nvidia has profits to spare. It’d be nice if the gap were bigger, or to see what Intel could do with more cores. While the company says its newer Xe2 cores offer 70 percent better performance per core than last gen, the B580 doesn’t get a 70 percent performance uplift because it includes fewer cores.

I wouldn’t bet on such a future card coming out, though, because Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger recently suggested the company’s discrete graphics card were on the chopping block — shortly before he got chopped from Intel himself.

Intel’s also announcing some very welcome upgrades to its XeSS technology today, a resolution and frame rate enhancing competitor to Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR. The new XeSS 2 now offers frame generation (which substantially increases frame rates by imagining new frames between existing ones) and a Xe Low Latency mode that, Intel claims, can completely eliminate the penalty of using that frame generation technique.

For best results, Low Latency needs to be integrated into games to sync with their game engines correctly, but Intel will offer a driver-based version you can toggle on and off, too.

Intel says XeSS 2 is coming to F1 24, Marvel Rivals, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Killing Floor 3, Citadels, Dying Light 2, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions, Ascendant, and RoboCop: Rogue City.