Introduction

Intel today launched the Arc B570 graphics card, its second release from the Arc Battlemage generation, and we have with us the Sparkle Arc B570 Guardian OC. The B570 is a follow-up to the B580, which has had a great response both from reviewers and gamers for the value and future-proofing it offered at its starting price of $250, outclassing segment leaders such as the GeForce RTX 4060—no small feat, AMD has been trying. The B570 comes in at a starting price of $220, although custom design cards seem to all start at $230, including the Sparkle Guardian OC we are reviewing today. This sets the B570 about $30-40 apart from the B580, and since the GPU has fewer physical components on the board, such as one less memory chip and lighter VRM, Intel designed the B570 to fry the competition around the $200-mark, or even below it. NVIDIA hasn’t released a successor to the RTX 3050 in the RTX 40-series, and AMD has a Pacific-wide performance gap between the RX 6500 XT and the RX 7600. This segment is what Intel is going after with the slick new B570.

The B570 is based on the Xe2 Battlemage graphics architecture which the B580 brought to discrete gaming GPUs, but which made its debut with the iGPU of Intel’s Core Ultra Lunar Lake mobile processor. Intel took many learnings from the Arc Alchemist generation, took a good look at where the market is headed, and where the money is at, before sitting down to design Battlemage. The company claims a massive 70% SIMD performance gain over Alchemist for its newer Xe cores, which allows Intel to give its GPUs fewer numbers of them to achieve a performance-watt target; and anywhere between 50% to 100% gain in the various processes related to ray tracing, allowing Intel to lower the performance cost of enabling ray tracing in your AAA games. The company also claims a 50% generational performance per watt gain, due in part to the new TSMC 5 nm EUV foundry node. We know from our Arc B580 reviews that many of these claims hold up when you compare it with the Arc A580.

The B570 is based on the same 5 nm BMG-G21 silicon as the B580, but is further cut down. We don’t know the exact count of Xe cores on this silicon yet, but the B580 has 20 of them enabled, and the B570 reduces this by 10%, to 18 Xe cores. This results in 112 execution units (EU), or 2,240 unified shaders. Other specs include 144 XMX units for AI matrix math acceleration, 18 second generation ray tracing units, 144 TMUs, and 60 ROPs. Intel has given the B570 a respectable 10 GB of memory, across a slightly narrowed 160-bit GDDR6 memory bus. This memory ticks at 19 Gbps, to yield 380 GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is still a superior memory configuration to the ones the RTX 4060 and the RX 7600 come with—both with 8 GB of 18 Gbps 128-bit GDDR6 memory. The B570 retains all the display I/O and media acceleration chops of the B580. On the I/O front, you get DisplayPort 2.1 with up to UHBR13.5 along with HDMI 2.1; and on the media front, you get two sets of hardware-accelerated video encoders and decoders, which can crunch through HEVC and AV1, making the B570 a fairly powerful GPU for video professionals.

Beyond the hardware, Intel brings to the table a surprisingly mature software backbone for its Arc GPUs, including an agile driver update cycle that responds to new game releases, a clean software front-end for its drivers; and a formidable software feature-set, including the new XeSS 2. This combines XeSS super resolution, along with the new XeFG (Xe Frame Generation), and XeLL (Xe Low Latency), which bring Intel up to par with NVIDIA and AMD on similar technologies. XeSS 2 not only makes gameplay at higher settings possible, but also gives the GPU a degree of future-proofing.

We could categorize the Sparkle Arc B570 Guardian OC as a semi custom-design. The cooling solution is custom-designed by Sparkle, including its aluminium fin-stack heatsink and a set of premium axial flow fans; but the underlying PCB is Intel reference (which is a good thing). There is no reference design card for the B570, so the Sparkle Guardian OC is as close as it gets to one; but at a $10 premium. Justifying this is a small factory overclock of 2.66 GHz engine clock, compared to 2.50 GHz reference. The memory is left untouched at 19 Gbps.