The release of the Intel Arc B580 and B570 “Battlemage” graphic cards was announced today according to the sources and aims to make a mark on the budget-friendly PC gaming scene. The Intel GPUs will mark a ambitious drive into the discrete gaming market, and it has the specifications to even compete with some of the popular mid-range cards available today.
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The Mid-Range Marvel
The Intel Arc B580, priced at the $249 mark, features 20 Xe-Cores and 12 GB of GDDR6 memory. The card boasts of having a factory overclock speed of 2.8 GHz, supports PCle 4.0, DisplayPort 2.1 and HDMI 2.1, and supports a maximum resolution of 8K. The B580 is statistically 10% faster than the Nvidia RTX 4060 at 1440p, making it a rather excellent choice for gamers who want a little bit of a push in their gaming system. Rivaling Nvidia’s DLSS 3 in terms of frame generation and performance, we have Intel’s XeSS 2 upscaling technology, thereby offering a significant performance boost at a competitive price.
The Budget Beast
The B570 falls to be the more affordable option at $219 and comes with some slight reduction in performance. It comes with 18 Xe-cores, 10GB of GDDR6 memory and a speed of 2.6 GHz without overclocking. When it comes to the resolution scale, it supports a maximum resolution of 7,680 x 4,320 and is designed for gaming from 1080p to 1440p. The B570 surely does not match the performance of the B580 but puts an ease on the customer’s wallet, making it a good budgetary choice.
About The New Architecture Xe2
The new Intel B-series also receives the latest Xe2 architecture, which is meant to optimize and deliver improved efficiency and higher performance per core with less of software overhead. The robust architecture is meant to handle modern tasks even better and includes high-performance AI engines. These now upgraded cores promise to bring you better ray tracing, improved shading, and enhanced support for graphical functions. Overall the Xe2 architecture aims to provide a better gaming experience for the Intel B-series.
Comparison to the Nvidia 4060
When compared to graphic cards such as the previously mentioned Nvidia RTX 4060, which itself is a decent piece of hardware, we can observe some interesting things about the Battlemage graphic card. For starters, the Intel Arc B580 is significantly cheaper than the RTX 4060, which sells at a base price of $299, making the Intel product $50 cheaper.
Compared to RTX 4060’s 8GB VRAM, Intel’s 12GB can be beneficial for memory-intensive games. The B580 offers improved ray tracing performance and AI capabilities too, making it a strong competitor to Nvidia’s DLSS technology. In terms of power consumption, Artic B580 takes a slightly higher charge at 190W compared to 160W for Nvidia, however, this proves to not be a problem looking at the advantages the B580 has.
Conclusion
Overall, the Intel Arc B580 and 570 promise decent performance and benchmarks on the most recent games such as Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 have provided impressive frame rates of around 60fps. These new offerings provide gamers with more affordable options and a variety when it comes to deciding what GPU they would like to use. For Intel’s newest foray into the GPU market, the Battlemage has indeed been a safe, affordable and impressive venture.
