Intel Arc B580 review: Intel desperately needed this to go well

Although there are technically three companies battling it out in the graphics card arena, you’d be forgiven for believing it to be a duopoly between AMD and Nvidia. Intel’s Arc launch in 2022 wasn’t the smoothest but it was an entirely new platform for the company and software takes time to perfect, especially for the GPU. Consider how many years AMD and Nvidia have over Intel in the discrete GPU market and it’s clear time is a valuable resource since the first wave of Arc GPUs enjoyed subsequent driver updates that addressed many of the initial complaints.

Fast-forward to 2024 and we have yet more obscenely priced GPUs. AMD and Nvidia are gearing up for their next-gen launches and Intel just casually dropped a new GPU ahead of the festive holidays. The all-new Intel Arc B580 replaces the A580 and is designed for butter-smooth 1440p gaming with ray tracing and other advanced features. The Intel Arc B-series will launch on laptops, desktops, and gaming handhelds, but today we’ll focus on how Intel has improved things for the desktop PC. After playing around with the GPU for a week, I can comfortably say this is one excellent value-focused graphics card.

After the absolute disaster of the 14th Gen Core and Core Ultra 200 series launches, Intel desperately needed this Arc B580 GPU to land. It seems the graphics division had everything in place for a comfortable touchdown. Day 0 driver support is present with solid performance across various games. Although this won’t blow AMD and Nvidia out of the park, especially with their next-gen cards surely on the way, Intel is certainly showing the company means business. Excellent 1440p performance with ray tracing at $250? Where do I sign up?!

About this review: Intel provided XDA with this sample for the review but had no input to its contents.

Your changes have been saved

Intel Arc B580

Intel needed a win for 2024 and the GPU division came out with a beauty of a graphics card. This affordable GPU can handle 1440p gaming with ray tracing enabled, providing an entry point for those who don’t wish to pay inflated prices.

Pros

• Impressive performance per Dollar
• Stellar 1440p gaming with ray tracing
• XeSS has come a long way
• A true “affordable” GPU

Cons

• Not the most efficient graphics card
• Will struggle at 4K resolutions

Price, specifications, and availability

The Intel Arc B580 is going up against the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD Radeon RX 7600. Both GPUs were priced at more than $250 at launch with the 4060 commanding a $300 price tag. That’s not terrible, but it’s also not as affordable as gamers were hoping for. Enter Intel with the $249 Arc B580, a GPU that has more firepower than even the $50 more RTX 4060. There’s a higher boost clock speed, 4GB of more video RAM, a faster memory bus with higher bandwidth, and a solid number of shader units. I don’t believe Intel could have added anything else to this GPU and kept its low price tag.

• 	Intel Arc B580	Asus Dual GeForce RTX 4060	AMD Radeon RX 7600
  Ray Accelerators/Cores	20	24	32
  AI Accelerators/Cores	160	96	64
  Base Clock Speed	1700 MHz	1830 MHz	2250MHz
  Boost Clock Speed	2670 MHz	2460 MHz	2655MHz
  Memory Capacity	12 GB GDDR6	8 GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6
  Memory Bus	192-bit	128-bit	128-bit
  Memory Bandwidth	460.8 GB/s	272 GB/s	288GB/s
  Power Draw	190 W	115 W	165 W
  Architecture	Generation 12.7	Ada Lovelace	RDNA 3
  Process	5 nm	5 nm	6nm
  Shader Units	2,560	3072	2048

What I like about the Intel Arc B580

Improved GPU architecture

Let’s start with where Intel made some changes to the underlying architecture. Intel Arc B-series has Xe Super Sampling 2 (XeSS2), the latest iteration of the company’s super-sampling technology. There’s also XMX AI acceleration similar to Nvidia GeForce 40-series GPUs and better overall system performance for what Intel bills the “best-in-class performance per Dollar”. The all-new B580 is a 1440p powerhouse, making full use of Intel’s new Xe2 architecture that saw much work on efficiency and utilization to ensure everything part of the GPU works optimally.

First-gen Intel Arc cards were running on an early platform, which required Intel to scale its engine for the first time. With less software overhead, the B-series can build on top of the more than 50 drivers shipped with the first wave of Intel Arc graphics cards. More than 120 games were supported at day 0, so Intel is getting the software right. By implementing Xe2 with reduced latency, eliminating stalls, and improving handshakes between software and hardware, Intel can bring its performance figures up. The company claims the B580 is around 24% faster than the previous-gen Intel Arc A750.

This is largely due to Xe2 and its per-core performance improvements. We’ve got more caching, better shader performance, and support for XeSS Frame Generation (XeSS-FG) and XeSS Super Resolution (XeSS-SR). Then there’s Xe Low Latency (XeLL), which creates quite the formula with XeSS. The ray tracing unit also has considerably more bandwidth and is better equipped to handle even the more demanding lighting scenes. Finally, let’s talk about that VRAM. 12GB to work with compared to just 8GB with the Nvidia and AMD competitor GPUs.

Stealthy design

I adored the original Arc GPUs for their stealthy and sleek designs. Intel has refined this approach for the B-series and the B580 certainly looks the part. There’s only one part of the entire GPU that has an LED and that’s the Intel Arc branding on the side. The rest of it is gloriously stealthy. Two giant fans on the front ensure enough cool air blasts the heatsink and the smaller PCB allows for half the GPU to be used for air passthrough — seriously, the GPU is tiny compared to this full-size shroud. A single 8-pin power connector is present, which is great for low to mid-range cards. We’ve got a single HDMI 2.1a and three DisplayPort 2.1 ports on the rear and that’s about it!

Related

Best GPUs in 2024: Our top graphics card picks

Picking the right graphics card can be difficult given the sheer number of options on the market. Here are the best graphics cards to consider.

Incredible performance per dollar

I’m just going to put this out there. The Intel Arc B580 managed to pull off 40 frames per second in Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K. That doesn’t sound impressive, but this is configured at RT Ultra, which essentially cranks everything up to 11. Intel’s XeSS 1.3 was enabled and path tracing was disabled, but considering this is positioned as a 1440p gaming machine to take on the AMD Radeon RX 7600 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060, Intel has worked some magic with this Arc GPU. Switching the resolution to 1440p bumped performance up to an average of 60 FPS, where we need to be at a minimum.

To test this GPU, I used our resident AMD test bench with the AMD Ryzen 7 9700X CPU, 32 GB of DDR5-6400 RAM, and the trusty Gigabyte X670E Aorus Master motherboard. This processor can handle more powerful GPUs than the Intel Arc B580, so we shouldn’t see any bottlenecks outside the GPU, allowing us to measure and compare figures at various resolutions. I ran the GPU through some synthetic benchmarks before moving on to a suite of games, varying in resource demands and visual fidelity. For the synthetic workloads, the B580 performed well.

Intel has more VRAM going for it with the Arc B580. Cranking up resolution and ray tracing settings will require more resources from the GPU, which the Arc B580 can handle with some incredible results. Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the best RPGs of recent years and the B580 can easily play it at a comfortable frame rate surpassing 60 at 1440p and everything configured to ultra. I’ve already touched on how this GPU performed with Cyberpunk 2077, but the same goes for The Witcher 3 with XeSS and ray tracing all enabled. 1440p is a popular resolution for gamers and now you can enjoy ray tracing for less than $250.

You won’t be disappointed with 1440p gaming. There are instances where the GPU doesn’t pull away from the 4060 too much (and outright loses in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p), which leaves room for Nvidia to claw back ahead with its next-gen offering. But we’ll need to see how the next GPUs fare and how Nvidia plans to price them at launch. For now, at the end of 2024, this is the best-value 1440p ray tracing-capable gaming card by a considerable margin.

Great software support

Intel rebranded its graphics software to … well, Intel Graphics Software. It’s a neat tool that mirrors those available for AMD GPUs. Nvidia is also working on new software with a cleaner interface. The Intel Graphics Software is easy to navigate, handles driver updates, and allows for managing settings for the Intel GPU (and Intel CPU if present). A cool feature of this tool is the available performance graphs with in-depth information on frames and other metrics. This data can be collected while running benchmarks or game sessions to determine how the system is performing.

The drivers are much more mature and I experienced no issues regarding software. There are instances where optimization needs to be implemented and/or improved, but as a whole, this is a stable launch.

Related

Best GPU benchmarks: 5 options to test your graphics card performance

Trust these programs to tell you how well your GPU performs

What I dislike about Intel’s new GPU

Not the coolest kid on the block

The Intel Arc B580 looks the part and I’ve always been a fan of the company’s Arc designs, but this thing runs hot. I’m not talking temperatures as just north of 70 Celcius with an ambient reading of 21 Celcius is solid with quiet and efficient cooling. It’s the power draw. This GPU has a notably higher TDP than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD Radeon RX 7600. It’s faster overall, sure, but that comes at the cost of power draw and thermals. As aforementioned, AMD and Nvidia have yet to announce their respective next-gen products, so we could see an RTX 5060 and RX 8600 hit the shelves in 2025, leapfrogging the Arc B580.

Slightly weaker 1080p showing

Intel focused on 1440p resolutions and it shows with the Intel Arc B580. Performance in many of the more demanding games such as Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing enabled and everything set to ultra is incredible for a $250 GPU. But crank some settings down, disable XeSS, and lower the resolution to 1080p and things don’t look as rosy for the Intel GPU. It performs strongly but isn’t the smoking gun against existing AMD and Nvidia GPUs. This could be software-related, however. The Intel Arc B570 could be better for 1080p gaming, whereas this card is certainly positioned for even some lighter 4K experiences.

Should you buy the Intel Arc B580?

You should buy the Intel Arc B580 if:

• You don’t fancy spending more than $250 on a GPU.
• You want one of the best-performing 1440p cards on a budget.
• You wish to help Intel break up the AMD and Nvidia duopoly.

You shouldn’t buy the Intel Arc B580 if:

• You want to play games at 4K above 60 FPS.
• You want the most efficient GPU for gaming.

Did I mention this is a sub-$250 graphics card? Well, it’s worth stating again that Intel has brought back reasonable GPU pricing. The Intel Arc B580 won’t blow your socks off, but it can handle some serious heavy loads too. Baldur’s Gate was no problem at ultra settings and Cyberpunk is technically playable at 4K with ray tracing, so long as you remember to enable Intel’s XeSS. It’s a marvel how these technologies work to improve the overall experience as without XeSS or DLSS, we’d see considerably worse gaming performance with ray tracing and other advanced graphical effects.

For the best gaming experiences possible, you’ll still want the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090. Intel doesn’t plan on challenging that. Not even AMD is going anywhere near the RTX 4080 Super or RTX 4090. This GPU is positioned to offer excellent performance at one of the more popular resolutions. Not everyone is leaping 1080p to 4K, with 1440p viewed by many to be the “sweet spot”. The Arc B580 is one of the best 1440p graphics cards for less than $250. Period. Here’s to Intel bringing back consumer-friendly GPU pricing and I cannot wait to see what comes out of its GPU division next.

Your changes have been saved

Intel Arc B580

The Intel Arc B580 is one of the launch GPUs for Intel’s second-gen graphics card family. Rocking a new architecture, generational performance improvements, and the same budget-friendly price, this is the GPU to buy for affordable 1440p gaming.