Intel Arc B580 review: Late arriving, still welcome

It’s not being spelt out overtly, but there is a whiff of Intel’s new Battlemage GPUs being pitched as what the Alchemist generation should have been. Those eventually grew into their PCIe shoes, but only after months of dial-shifting driver updates – whereas the flagship B580 promises Nvidia-besting games performance from the off. Even at such a stage in the current graphics generation (the GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 could be revealed literally tonight, at CES 2025), there is something enticing about that proposition.

It helps, obviously, that the B580 isn’t competing with the RTX 5090 or 5080, which will no doubt cost about the same as the amount of Fabergé eggs you’d need to crack to make an unpleasantly sharp wedding cake. Instead, and despite Intel’s suggestion that it’s a 1440p machine, the B580 is much more of a 1080p-bopping RTX 4060 rival. Here in the UK, its pricing range is more or less dead even with Nvidia’s GPU, with the cheapest starting at £270 and Intel’s own Limited Edition (on test here) costing £300. Stateside, it’s even cheaper, with the Limited Edition only asking for $260 when most RTX 4060 models are sticking around $300.

That minus-forty dollars also happens to pay for 4GB more VRAM than the 4060, the B580 packing 12GB of GDDR6. It still requires Resizeable BAR to work properly, but the Battlemage architecture targets several weaknesses of Alchemist as well, tuning up its ray tracing cores and no longer regarding DirectX 9 games with such a look of revulsion and fear. Which all sounds lovely – lord knows the world could do with more cheap-ish GPUs that aren’t, like AMD’s Radeon 7600, kind of pointless.

In the actual running of games, however, getting the most out the Arc B580 isn’t as simple as slapping on ReBAR. First, at Intel’s preferred rez of 2560×1440, it managed only a somewhat decent-ish showing when paired with the RPS test rig’s Core i5-11600K. With the exception of modest, single-digit framerate advantages in Metro Exodus and F1 2022, it performs near enough identically to the nearly two-year-old RTX 4060, even with all that bonus memory.

Thing is, I’ve been wanting to update our GPU benchmark process for ages, what with most of these games either being superseded by sequels or getting about as long in the tooth as the i5-11600K itself. I therefore decided to stop putting it off and try a refreshed system, with newer games and a PC based around the Core i9-13900K. Less of a representative-of-the-masses CPU, perhaps, but one that should be less prone to bottlenecking than the old i5.

With this younger, faster processor to play off, the B580 turned its drawing performance against the RTX 4060 into a clean sweep victory:

Look at it, shooting up from 3fps behind in Shadow of the Tomb Raider (granted, with different anti-aliasing) to 12fps ahead. And in Metro Exodus, the RTX 4060 didn’t benefit at all from the CPU upgrade, but the Arc B580 claimed another 5fps.

Unlike the Radeon 7600, and for that matter most AMD GPUs, the B580 can also give Nvidia a run for their money on ray tracing. Running Cyberpunk 2077 on the upgraded rig with Psycho-level RT effects and max-quality upscaling, the Arc B580 averaged 39fps with XeSS – dead even with the RTX 4060 using DLSS. Flicking on Ultra-quality ray tracing in Metro Exodus also saw the Arc B850 keep its lead, scoring 52fps to the RTX 4060’s 43fps. And that was without any upscaling help at all.

I’m still not sure that the Arc B580 is the 1440p bargain that Intel say it is – it’s clearly capable at that resolution, but it’s also just scraping 60fps in newer games, and for just an extra £70 or so would get the much quicker RTX 4060 Ti. Down at 1080p, on the other hand, it’s all smooth sailing, even if the RTX 4060 is often faster on the old test rig.

With the Core i9-13900K, though, it’s another win for Battlemage, pulling multiple double-digit leads over the RTX 4060 and only falling slightly behind in Assassin’s Creed Mirage.

Again, there wasn’t much daylight between the two in the ray-traced Cyberpunk 2077 test – the Arc B580 got 58fps, the RTX 4060 got 59fps – and with Ultra RT enabled in Metro Exodus, Intel’s GPU remained faster, averaging 149fps to the GeForce’s 142fps. Since F1 2024’s Ultra High preset also enables ray tracing by default, it too shows that the Arc B580 can withstand the added strain without buckling.

There’s lots of good stuff here, even if you’re not actively part-shopping, and just want to see something chip away at the one-party state that is contemporary graphics cards. Nvidia is no longer the only manufacturer that can do ray tracing well, and can no longer claim undisputedly to make the fastest sub-£300 card of the current generation – at native rez, anyway. Even the RTX 4060’s excellent power efficiency doesn’t go unchallenged: the Arc B580 would appear to be the loser here, with its 190W power draw rating and 600W PSU requirement dwarfing that of the 4060’s 115W rating and 550W requirement. In practice, though, the highest I recorded the B580 drawing was just 118W, beating the 126W I saw on the 4060. This Limited Edition model runs cooler as well, typically staying around 63°c under load; its Nvidia rival flicked around 69-74°c range.

Like I say, good stuff. However, the Arc B580’s reliance on CPU brawn also means that personal perspective applies far more keenly than it would to the usual bar graph comparisons. Does this card do well to leverage newer CPU tech to eke out a performance advantage, or is it in fact yoked to the latest, most expensive chips in such a way that renders it a non-starter to those on older PCs?

Honestly, I think it’s a bit of both. Keeping in mind that cheaper graphics cards tend to naturally find their way into otherwise ageing desktops, it’s definitely not ideal for the Arc B580’s best capabilities to be so closely linked the upgrade of another, relatively expensive component. At the same time, it’s not like there’s a stone-carved requirement for the newest Core i9. My previous CPU testing suggests that the i9-13900K isn’t actually that much faster than the mid-range Core i5-13600K, which is itself only marginally faster than the Core i5-12600K, which is three generations old at this point. In other words, the Arc B580 could lose out in an older PC setup, but anyone who’s updated in the last few years will probably be fine.

It’s not just ray tracing where Intel is catching up, either. It’s currently only released and functional in F1 24, but XeSS 2 – the latest version of their DLSS-like upscaling tech – provides another tool for the Arc B580 to crank up its framerates. So far, XeSS 2 looks like a match for DLSS on general visual quality – quite the achievement, considering AMD FSR has been trying and failing for years – and its new frame generation component also does an impressive job of replicating DLSS 3’s AI-generated smoothness boost. Beating it, even. That 45fps at 1440p became 80fps with XeSS 2 on, while at 1080p it lept from 56fps to 102fps, in both cases rising above the respective 57fps and 77fps that the RTX 4060 produced with DLSS 3.

Again, AMD have attempted something very similar with FSR 3, but XeSS 2 seems to produce better-looking results without adding as much input lag. I’d be keen to try out XeSS 2 in something twitchier than a gamepad-controlled racer, but what F1 24 shows so far is encouraging.

The catch, mind, is that DLSS 3 has had a huge head start on game support, currently being available in over 100 games and with dozens more on the way. It’s hard to see XeSS 2 catching up, ever, which means that DLSS 3 remains a more valuable feature – and that value is transferred to the GPUs that support it, including the RTX 4060.

As such, the Arc B580 doesn’t quite make the RTX 4060 obsolete. Nvidia will likely keep first dibs on doing that themselves, with the inevitable RTX 5060. The GeForce is also a safer bet for 1080p rigs that are still using the CPUs of yesteryear, as the fact that it doesn’t benefit as much from newer chips tells us that it also won’t lose out as much with older chips.

Conversely, for all-new builds (or PCs that have been freshened up outside the GPU), the Arc B580 is a legit alternative. Arguably the better one, in fact, if you can live without a more widely available flavour of frame gen. Besides fixing Alchemist’s ray tracing weakness and generally stabilising everything – I’ve experienced none of the crashing that I did with the Arc A750 – the Battlemage architecture has produced a pleasantly peppy, affordable GPU that’s more than enough for slick 1080p. And it doesn’t even need twenty driver updates to get there.