Introduction

The ASRock Arc B580 Steel Legend is the company’s premium custom design take on Intel’s newest performance segment GPU, the B580 Battlemage. The Steel Legend brand represents a balance of rugged industrial build quality, and cost. In ASRock’s stack of graphics cards and motherboards, it’s positioned a notch below the Phantom Gaming series, but a notch above Challenger. The company is also launching the Arc B580 Challenger today. The Arc B580 heralds Intel’s second generation of Xe branded discrete gaming GPUs. These are contemporary, meet DirectX 12 Ultimate API requirements, and come with a comprehensive set of gaming experience enhancements under the XeSS 2 feature suite.

The new Xe2 Battlemage graphics architecture debuted with the iGPU solution of Intel’s Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake mobile processor, but a more specialized version of this launches today with the B580, and its value sibling, the B570. The B580 logically follows the A580, a barely 1080p-capable graphics card. However, the B580 offers a significant performance improvement. It boasts a 70% increase in SIMD performance due to its architecture. Additionally, the 5 nm process contributes to a 50% boost in performance-per-watt. As a result, the B580 outperforms all models in the Arc A-series Alchemist generation, including the flagship A770.

At its starting price of $250, the B580 is positioned more logically against the RTX 4060 and AMD’s Radeon RX 7600 and RX 7600 XT, than the awkward placement the A580 had, against the RTX 3050. Battlemage promises not just a generational gain in raster 3D performance, but the company worked to significantly boost the ray tracing units, adding anywhere between 50% to 100% gains in performance for the various ray tracing workloads. This, along with XeSS 2, reduces the performance cost of ray tracing.

XeSS 2 is a collection of three features, XeSS Super Resolution (XeSS SR), which is the original XeSS from the Arc A-series; the new XeSS Frame Generation (XeSS FG), which is a new AI-based frame rate doubling technology; and Xe Low Latency (XeLL), a feature that counteracts the system latency imposed by ray tracing, XeSS SR, and XeSS FG. XeLL can work as a standalone feature, too. Intel also introduced driver-based latency reduction, which works on any game without Xe-specific optimization.

The Arc B580 is based on the 5 nm BMG-G21 silicon, and comes with 20 Xe2 cores, worth 128 execution units, or 2,560 unified shaders. There are also 160 XMX cores, 20 Ray Tracing Units, and a solid raster 3D machinery consisting of 80 ROPs, and 160 TMUs. The memory sub-system features a large 18 MB last-level cache on the GPU, and 12 GB of 19 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit memory interface, for 50% more memory bandwidth than both the RTX 4060 and the RX 7600 XT. The GPU also comes with two sets of hardware video encoders and decoders, and a modern display I/O, including DisplayPort 2.1 UHBR 13.5, which should draw some attention from creative professionals.

The ASRock B580 Steel Legend looks like it’s from a segment above. It’s currently listed for $270 on Newegg, which is a $20 increase over the Intel reference card price point. You’re getting a large triple-slot cooling solution, and a PCB with two 8-pin power connectors instead of one. The B580 comes with a default board power limit of 190 W, and so although the reference-design card comes with just one connector, the second one could come handy with overclocking, and to contain any spikes in power draw.