Introduction

The release of Intel’s Arc B580 graphics cards heralds two pieces of good news—first, it’s the 2nd generation Xe Battlemage graphics architecture; and second, that Intel is here to stay in the PC gaming graphics hardware industry. This is important, because for all the gloom that’s associated with Intel these days, the company remains one of Silicon Valley’s tallest giants, holds the vast majority of the PC and server processor markets, and IP invented or acquired over a period of half a century. If there’s anyone that can keep both NVIDIA and AMD on notice, and spring surprises, it’s Intel. The company’s first-gen Xe Alchemist architecture may not have unseated the incumbents, but Intel demonstrated capability in engineering a modern discrete GPU that meets the latest DirectX 12 Ultimate API, including sophisticated ray tracing hardware pipeline, and a robust software backend.

With Battlemage, things are only getting heated up—Intel claims 70% generational increases in SIMD performance of its Xe cores, and a 50% increase in performance-per-Watt, due in part to the switch to 5 nm EUV foundry node. This has allowed the company to debut the architecture with the Arc B580, which succeeds the mid-range A580, and not the company’s flagship A770. The B580 is claimed by Intel to be faster than most of the Arc A-series, including the A750.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Arc B580 launch is its price of $250, and the fact that Intel is positioning it against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 and the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT. If you turn the clocks back to 2022, the top A770 and A750 were only compared to the RTX 3060, nothing faster, and so the B580 being compared to the RTX 4060 at a $50 (15%) lower price means that Intel wants to gun for market share against NVIDIA’s most popular SKU from its current GeForce Ada Lovelace generation. NVIDIA is rumored to launch the successor to the RTX 4060 only by March 2025, which means Intel has headroom in which to grab some sales away from the RTX 4060 and the RX 7600/7600 XT.

The Arc B580 is based on the 5 nm BMG-G21 silicon, and comes with 20 Xe2 cores, for 128 execution units, or 2,560 unified shaders. There are also 20 Ray Tracing Units, and 160 XMX matrix accelerators. For a mid-range SKU, Intel has given the B580 some solid raster 3D chops, with 160 TMUs, and 80 ROPs. You get 12 GB of 19 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit memory bus, which offers nearly 50% more memory bandwidth than the memory interfaces of the RTX 4060 and the RX 7600 XT.

Battlemage introduces the new Xe2 Core, with large generational improvements in compute performance, and Intel studied the nuts and bolts of the graphics rendering pipeline through its sales and software-side long-term support of the Arc A-series, to identify key areas of improvement in its hardware. The Ray Tracing Unit of Battlemage gets special attention, with a 50-100% boost in performance of specific areas of the ray tracing stack. This works to reduce the overhead of ray tracing on the SIMD units and the CPU, and the overall performance cost of ray tracing.

Intel also introduced XeSS 2, which is a collection of three technologies—XeSS SR (super resolution), the new XeSS FG (frame generation), and XeLL (latency reduction technology). XeSS FG nearly doubles frame rates, and when combined with XeSS SR and XeLL, should significantly uplift the capability of the B580 from being a mid-range product, if you know your way around settings. There’s also a driver-based low latency mode that works on any game, even if it’s not explicitly optimized for XeSS 2.

In this review, we have with us the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition, which is a reference-design product, which will be sold directly by Intel (just like its processors). This is a modest $250 graphics card, and yet Intel made great effort to make the product design stand out. It is strictly 2 slots-thick, and needs no more than one 8-pin PCI power connector. Tomorrow we will have additional reviews of partner design cards for the B580.