It’s not overtly stated, but you can sense that the recent Intel Battlemage GPUs are being presented as what the Alchemist generation should be. These eventually grew into PCIe boots, but only after months of dial-up driver updates – while the flagship B580 promises Nvidia’s best gaming performance from the get-go. Even at this stage of the current graphics generation (GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 could be unveiled literally tonight, at CES 2025), there is something tempting about this proposition.
It helps, of course, that the B580 isn’t competing with the RTX 5090 or 5080, which will no doubt cost about the same as the number of Fabergé eggs you need to crack to bake an unpleasantly sizzling wedding cake. Instead, despite Intel’s suggestion that it is a 1440p machine, the B580 is much more of a competitor to the 1080p-hopping RTX 4060. Here in the UK, the price range is more or less dead even for Nvidia GPUs, with the cheapest prices starting at £270 and Intel’s restricted edition (tested here) costing £300. It’s even cheaper in the States – the restricted edition costs only $260, while most RTX 4060 models cost around $300.
As it happens, that minus forty dollars allows you to pay 4 GB more VRAM than the 4060, which is a B580 with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory. It still requires a Resizeable BAR to function properly, but the Battlemage architecture also targets several of Alchemist’s weaknesses by tuning its ray tracing cores and no longer viewing DirectX 9 games with such an expression of disgust and fear. This all sounds wonderful – God knows the world could exploit more low-cost GPUs that aren’t, like AMD’s Radeon 7600, kind of pointless.
Intel Arc B580 review: 1440p benchmarks
However, when gaming, getting the most out of the Arc B580 isn’t as straightforward as hitting ReBAR. First, at Intel’s preferred resolution of 2560×1440, paired with a Core i5-11600K on the RPS test platform, it only achieved decent results. With the exception of modest single-digit framerate advantages in Metro Exodus and F1 2022, it performs almost identically to the nearly two-year-old RTX 4060, even with all that extra memory.
The thing is, I’ve been wanting to update our GPU benchmarking process for a long time, as most of these games have either been replaced by sequels or have reached as advanced a level as the i5-11600K itself. So I decided not to put it off and try out a refreshed system, with newer games and a computer based on the Core i9-13900K. Perhaps a processor less representative of the masses, but one that should be less prone to bottlenecks than the aged i5.
With a younger, faster processor to compete with, the B580 turned its drawing performance over the RTX 4060 into a spotless win:
Look at this, speeding up from 3fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider (with different anti-aliasing, of course) to 12fps forward. In Metro Exodus, the RTX 4060 did not benefit from the CPU upgrade at all, but the Arc B580 achieved another 5 frames per second.
Unlike the Radeon 7600 and, for that matter, most AMD GPUs, the B580 could also give Nvidia a chance to take advantage of ray tracing. Running Cyberpunk 2077 on upgraded hardware with Psycho-level RT effects and upscaling, the Arc B580 averaged 39 frames per second with XeSS – dead even on the RTX 4060 using DLSS. Enabling ultra-quality ray tracing in Metro Exodus also saw the Arc B850 maintain its lead, hitting 52 frames per second compared to 43 frames per second on the RTX 4060. And that’s without any upscaling facilitate.
Intel Arc B580 Review: 1080p Benchmarks
I’m still not sure the Arc B580 is the 1440p bargain Intel claims it is – that’s obvious capable at this resolution, but it also causes a 60fps drop in newer games, and for an extra £70 you can get a much faster RTX 4060 Ti. On the other hand, at 1080p everything runs smoothly, even if the RTX 4060 is often faster on the aged test device.
However, in the case of the Core i9-13900K, it is another victory for Battlemage, gaining multiple double-digit leads over the RTX 4060 and only slightly falling behind Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
Again, in Cyberpunk 2077’s ray-tracing test, there wasn’t much daylight between the two – the Arc B580 achieved 58 frames per second, the RTX 4060 achieved 59 frames per second – and when Ultra RT was enabled in Metro Exodus, the Intel GPU remained faster , achieving an average of 149 frames per second compared to the GeForce’s 142 fps. Since the Ultra High preset in F1 2024 also enables ray tracing by default, it also shows that the Arc B580 can withstand the additional load without buckling.
There’s plenty of good stuff here, even if you’re not actively part-shopping and just want to see something break away from the one-party state that is state-of-the-art graphics cards. Nvidia is no longer the only manufacturer that can do ray tracing well, and it can no longer unquestionably claim to produce the fastest current-generation card under £300 – at native resolution, anyway. Even the RTX 4060’s excellent power efficiency is not without caveats: the Arc B580 would seem to be the underdog here, with its 190W power draw and 600W PSU requirements exceeding the 4060’s rated 115W and 550W requirements. In practice, however, the highest draw the power I recorded on the B580 was only 118 W, exceeding 126 W, that I’ve seen on the 4060. This restricted edition model also runs cooler, typically maintaining temperatures around 63°C under load; its Nvidia rival flickered in the 69-74°C range.
As I say, good thing. However, the Arc B580’s dependence on processor power also means that personal perspective matters much more than in straightforward bar chart comparisons. Does this card do a good job of taking advantage of newer CPU technology to gain a performance advantage, or is it actually coupled with the newest, most high-priced chips in such a way that it’s not a good start for older PCs?
Honestly, I think it’s a bit of both. Given that cheaper graphics cards naturally find their way into aging desktops, it’s definitely not ideal for the Arc B580’s best capabilities to be so closely tied to upgrading another, relatively high-priced component. At the same time, it’s not like the latest Core i9 has its requirements carved in stone. My previous CPU tests suggest that the i9-13900K isn’t actually that much faster than the mid-range Core i5-13600K, which itself is only slightly faster than the Core i5-12600K, which is three generations aged at this point. In other words, the Arc B580 may lose out on an older PC setup, but anyone who’s upgraded in the last few years will probably be fine.
Intel is catching up not only in the field of ray tracing. It’s currently only available and functional in F1 24, but XeSS 2 – the latest version of the DLSS-like scaling technology – gives the Arc B580 another tool to augment frame rates. So far, XeSS 2 is on par with DLSS in terms of overall image quality – quite an achievement considering AMD FSR has been trying and failing for years – and its recent frame generation component also impresses by replicating DLSS 3’s AI-generated smoothness boost. Even a beating. That 45fps at 1440p peaked at 80fps with XeSS 2 enabled, while at 1080p it dropped from 56fps to 102fps, both exceeding the 57fps and 77fps respectively that the RTX 4060 generated from DLSS 3.
Again, AMD tried to do something very similar with FSR 3, but XeSS 2 seems to produce better-looking results without adding as much input lag. I’d love to try XeSS 2 in something more lively than a pad-controlled racer, but what F1 24 has shown so far is encouraging.
The problem is that DLSS 3 has gained a huge advantage in terms of gaming support and is now available in over 100 games, with dozens more on the way. It’s challenging to see XeSS 2 ever catching up, which means DLSS 3 remains the more valuable feature – and that value is passed on to GPUs that support it, including the RTX 4060.
As such, the Arc B580 does not make the RTX 4060 obsolete. Nvidia will likely try to do this themselves with the inevitable RTX 5060. GeForce is also a safer choice for 1080p platforms that still exploit legacy CPUs since it doesn’t benefit as much from newer chips telling us it won’t lose as much on older chips .
Conversely, for brand recent builds (or PCs that have been refreshed beyond the GPU), the Arc B580 is a legitimate alternative. In fact, it’s probably better if you can live without the more widely available Frame gen. In addition to fixing Alchemist’s ray-tracing weakness and generally stabilizing everything – I didn’t experience any of the crashes I did with the Arc A750 – the Battlemage architecture creates a pleasantly peppy, low-cost GPU , which is quite enough for sleek 1080p. You don’t even need twenty driver updates to achieve this.
This review is based on the retail kit provided by the manufacturer.
