Reviews for the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition graphics card is officially out. It beats Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD Radeon RX 7600 easily in most games.
About ten days ago, Intel officially announced the Intel Arc B580 & Intel Arc B570 graphics cards. The reviews for Intel Arc B580 are officially out.
The Intel Arc B series is a successor to the Intel Arc A series of graphics cards, which had launched more than two years ago. The Intel Arc Alchemist had a lot of issues which caused them to perform poorly or suboptimally despite having powerful hardware inside them.
While Intel did try to fix those issues with driver updates which did improve the gaming performance massively in some games, the main issues remained.
With Intel Arc B series, Intel has made massive changes to the GPU architecture and even improved the ray tracing performance further.
Before anything. Let’s look at the specs.
Intel Arc B580 & Arc B570 Specs
| Graphics Card | Arc B580 | Arc B570 | Arc A770 | Arc A750 | Arc A580 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPU | BGM-G21 | BGM-G21 | DG2-512 | DG2-512 | DG2-512 |
| Architecture | Xe2 | Xe2 | Xe HPG | Xe HPG | Xe HPG |
| Process | TSMC N5 | TSMC N5 | TSMC N6 | TSMC N6 | TSMC N6 |
| GPU Chip Size | 272 mm² | 272 mm² | 406 mm² | 406 mm² | 406 mm² |
| Transistors | 19,600M | 19,600M | 21,700M | 21,700M | 21,700M |
| Xe-cores / RT | 20 | 18 | 32 | 28 | 24 |
| Shaders | 2560 | 2304 | 4096 | 3584 | 3072 |
| XMX Cores | 160 | 144 | 512 | 448 | 384 |
| Boost Clock | 2670 MHz | 2500 MHz | 2100 MHz | 2050 MHz | 1700 MHz |
| VRAM | 12GB | 10GB | 16GB / 8GB | 8GB | 8GB |
| VRAM Speed | 19Gbps | 19Gbps | 17.5Gbps | 16Gbps | 16Gbps |
| Bus Width | 192-bit | 160-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Bandwidth | 456 GB/s | 380 GB/s | 560 GB/s | 512 GB/s | 512 GB/s |
| L2 Cache | 18MB | 18MB | 16MB | 16MB | 8MB |
| PCIe | 4.0 x8 | 4.0 x8 | 4.0 x16 | 4.0 x16 | 4.0 x16 |
| TDP | 190W | 150W | 225W | 225W | 185W |
| Launch MSRP | $249 | $219 | $349 | $289 | $179 |
As one can see from the above specs. In the new graphics cards are lacking in hardware in almost everything when compared to previous-gen higher range models. Yet Intel claims the new graphics cards are far faster. This is thanks to the improvements in the new architecture and process.
Not only that. Intel claims the Intel Arc B580 is faster than the other budget graphics cards like Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and also AMD Radeon RX 7600. So much so that Intel is marketing it as a 1440p graphics card rather than a 1080p one.
But are all those claims true. Let’s check the reviews for the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition graphics cards.
Intel Arc B580 Reviews
Tom’s Hardware
Tom’s Hardware called the Intel Arc B580 graphics card the new $249 GPU champion.
At 1440p in gaming, Intel Arc B580 beats Nvidia RTX 4060 by 10%, which is great. However, that difference is reduced to 3% at 1080p.
It’s 5% faster than RX 7600 XT at 1440p, however, that difference is reduced to zero at 1080p. However, it shines greatly against the 8GB AMD RX 7600 which is a massive 38% slower at 1440p and 24% slower at 1080p against Intel’s offering.
It’s also 17% faster than previous-gen Intel Arc A770 16GB graphics card at 1440p and 24% faster at 1080p.
In ray tracing at 1440p, B580 beats RTX 4060 by 16% and that gap reduces to 9% at 1080p.
When compared to RX 7600 XT, B580 is 40% faster at both 1440p & 1080p in ray tracing. RX 7600 isn’t worth even talking about in ray tracing.
Compared to the previous-gen Arc A770 16GB, it’s 17% faster at 1440p and 23% faster at 1080p.
However, at 156W, Intel Arc B580 uses 22% more power than RTX 4060. It also uses 10% more power than RX 7600. However, it’s 20% more efficient than RX 7600 XT and 30% more efficient than previous-gen Arc A770 16GB.
TechSpot
Steve Walton from the Hardware Unboxed fame posted a written review for the Intel Arc B580 on TechSpot. Those who want to watch the video review can watch here instead.
At 1440p in gaming in raster performance, Intel Arc B580 is 14% faster than Nvidia RTX 4060 and 20% faster than AMD RX 7600. It’s also 20% faster than Arc A770 16GB.
At 1080p, B580 is 6% faster than Nvidia RTX 4060 and 8% faster than AMD RX 7600 and a big 22% faster than Arc A770 16GB.
Here the ray tracing performance changed the rankings. Here, they tested with respective upscaling turned on and the outcome is that the Intel Arc B580 is 18% slower than the Nvidia RTX 4060 at 1440p and 20% slower at 1080p. It’s however 55% faster than AMD RX 7600.
However, they do mention how hard it was to even run Nvidia RTX 4060 in some games with ray tracing enabled, even at 1080p.
In terms of power usage, B580 ranged 240W to 270W in different games. Which is anywhere between 20% to 27% more than RTX 4060.
TechPowerUP
TechPowerUP, known for its great reviews, tested and reviewed the Intel Arc B580 and called it a great value.
At 1440p in gaming in raster performance, Intel Arc B580 is 8% faster than RTX 4060, 9% faster than RX 7600 XT, 12% faster than Arc A770 16GB and a big 20% faster than RX 7600.
At 1080p, that gap reduces again. It’s 4% faster than RX 7600 XT, 5% faster than RTX 4060, 13% faster than RX 7600 and 14% faster than Intel Arc A770 16GB.
In ray tracing performance at 1440p, here the Intel Arc B580 is a massive 22% faster than RTX 4060 and 35% faster than RX 7600 XT. It’s also 14% faster than previous-gen Arc A770 16GB. These results are because many of the 8GB cards cannot do ray tracing easily at 1440p.
At 1080p, the difference is more expected ways. Here B580 is only 3% faster than RTX 4060, 14% faster than A770 and 29% faster than RX 7600 XT.
In power consumption, it seems TechPowerUP managed to make a proper use of the TDP that Intel has set. In gaming, it used 185W average in raster and 195W in ray tracing, which is far higher than the highly efficient RTX 4060 which used 128W in both.
TechPowerUP had a lot to say about the issues it faced in it’s concluding remarks. It ranged from driver issues to overclocking issues.
They also mentioned how it uses high amount of idle power because the VRAM keeps running at the same speed no matter what the load is. Intel recommends enabling ASPM in BIOS to fix the issue somewhat. Even the OS power profile needs to be changed.
KitGuru
KitGuru posted a written and a YouTube video review for the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition graphics card.
At 1440p in gaming in raster performance, Intel Arc B580 is 16% faster than RTX 4060, 9% faster than RX 7600 and 26% faster than Arc A750.
The difference reduces at 1080p, where B580 is 9% faster than RTX 4060, faster than RX 7600 and 29% faster than Arc A750.
In ray tracing, at 1440p, B580 is 7% faster than RTX 4060 and 32% faster than RX 7600 and Arc A750.
At 1080p, B580 is, in fact, on average 2% slower than RTX 4060. Particularly due to two specific games. Otherwise, it’s still far faster than RX 7600 XT and A750.
In terms of power usage, B580 used 160W in raster to 165W in ray tracing at 1440p. RTX 4060 on the other hand averaged 110W to 116W.
In terms of issues with the graphics card, KitGuru too has complaints. It gave constant crashes in some games. While some games refused to disable ray tracing. Some games gave inconsistent frame times. Some games had single digit performance and so on.
Conclusion
Those who are not satisfied with the reviews shared above can check out VideoCardz and 3DCenter, who have posted a larger list of reviewers with their links.
As for our opinion, we think that Intel Arc B580 is one of the greatest budget graphics card that has released in recent times. Its performance is excellent, both in raster and ray tracing. In all, Intel Arc B580 is faster than Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and RTX 3060 12GB and also faster than the likes of AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT and RX 7600. Not to forget, Intel has released its own frame generation tech to increase the performance further.
Also, it has 12GB VRAM, which is higher than Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD Radeon RX 7600 that come with 8GB VRAM. Honestly, we feel Nvidia and AMD should be ashamed of themselves for almost cheating the budget gamers by providing just 8GB VRAM. It’s rumored that RTX 5060 might continue to use the same 8GB of VRAM. Even AMD might do that with RX 8600.
A reminder, Intel Arc B580 at $249 is far cheaper than RTX 4060 and RX 7600 XT graphics cards.
Some issues for Intel Arc B580 remain, though. First are the drivers. While the Intel Arc drivers have improved massively over the couple of years, they need to improve further.
The second issue is that the GPU inside B580 is still quite bigger than the ones found in RTX 4060 and RX 7600. Because all of them are made at the same TSMC, it’s likely that Intel is not going to make too many profits out of it.
Another major problem is that there are rumors that Intel might shut down the Intel Arc graphics division after this or next series. We hope not. They should look at the reviews.
We aren’t quite sure about the availability, either. Whether they are in a proper stock or not.
While we aren’t quite sure when B570 reviews are going to release. We are also excited to see what Intel has to offer when it releases B750 and B770 graphics cards next year.
Either way, Intel Arc B580 is a great graphics card. We are happy to see Intel doing excellently on it.
