Intel's Arc B580 graphics cards have been its best-reviewed to date, maintaining the aggressive pricing of the old A-series Arc cards with fewer driver bugs, fewer weird performance outliers, and fewer caveats all around.
And this appears to be translating to retail success—the B580 is sold out across the board and difficult to find at its $249 MSRP. It's hard to tell if this is because demand has been good or supply was low (Intel says it has been restocking "weekly," for what that's worth). But regardless, there's clearly been some pent-up demand for an inexpensive-but-competent entry-level graphics card with decent ray-tracing performance and power efficiency and more than 8GB of RAM.
The Arc B570 is a less-powerful, less-interesting card than the B580, with fewer of Intel's Xe-cores, less memory bandwidth, and 10GB of RAM instead of 12GB. But it offers performance very similar to the RTX 4060 for $80 less—at least, if Intel and its partners can keep it in stock at that price—which makes it a dramatically more interesting budget option than $200-ish cards like the GeForce RTX 3050 or Radeon RX 6600.
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I did not go to CES 2025 with the goal of getting drenched by Lake Mead’s chilly January waters. But when I discovered Los Angeles-based boat startup Arc had brought its new sport boat to Las Vegas, I figured it was worth the risk. It was. The Arc Sport was a joy to drive, even […]
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Intel doesn't have a ton to show for its dedicated GPU efforts yet.
After much anticipation, many delays, and an anticipatory apology tour for its software quality, Intel launched its first Arc GPUs at the end of 2022. There were things to like about the A770 and A750, but buggy drivers, poor performance in older games, and relatively high power use made them difficult to recommend. They were more notable as curiosities than as consumer graphics cards.
The result, after more than two years on the market, is that Arc GPUs remain a statistical nonentity in the GPU market, according to analysts and the Steam Hardware Survey. But it was always going to take time—and probably a couple of hardware generations—for Intel to make meaningful headway against entrenched competitors.
© Andrew Cunningham
Turnover at the top of the company isn't stopping Intel from launching new products: Today the company is announcing the first of its next-generation B-series Intel Arc GPUs, the Arc B580 and Arc B570.
Both are decidedly midrange graphics cards that will compete with the likes of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD's RX 7600 series, but Intel is pricing them competitively: $249 for a B580 with 12GB of RAM and $219 for a B570 with 10GB of RAM. The B580 launches on December 13, while the B570 won't be available until January 16.
The two cards are Intel's first dedicated GPUs based on its next-generation "Battlemage" architecture, a successor to the "Alchemist" architecture used in the A-series cards. Intel's Core Ultra 200 laptop processors were its first products to ship with Battlemage, though they used an integrated version with fewer of Intel's Xe cores and no dedicated memory. Both B-series GPUs use silicon manufactured on a 5 nm TSMC process, an upgrade from the 6 nm process used for the A-series; as of this writing, no integrated or dedicated Arc GPUs have been manufactured by one of Intel's factories.
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