Intel launches new Arc B580 with 10% more performance than a RTX 4160 for $249, but the rumoured RTX4070-beater is nowhere in sight

Are you interested in the good or bad news about Intel’s new Arc B580 graphic card? The main good news about this card is that it even exists. Intel's second generation Battlemage graphics technology is official, announced, real and here.

Intel's claims are impressive, but the actual architecture is also pretty good. It has been updated to be more effective, to deliver a better utilisation and performance for each graphics core and also boasts improved ray-tracing and AI performances. Intel's ray-tracing performance may now match that of Nvidia pound-for pound.

What about the bad news then? The new B580 card and its B570 counterpart are both fairly low-end cards. Nvidia's goal is to beat the Nvidia RTX - 4060 by a small margin. At least for now, there is no B770 board that has RTX 4070 performance or higher.

The B580 has a 12 GB memory card with a 192 bit bus. This gives it a more powerful memory subsystem compared to the RTX 4060. It also has a higher bandwidth than the RTX4060 Ti. Only the 16 GB version can match or surpass the VRAM of the 580.

It has 20 Intel Xe cores, and according to our calculations, 2,560 shaders. The Arc A770, Intel's current top GPU, has 32 cores and 4,096 shading units. The Nvidia RTX 4060 has 3,072 shading units, although Intel's and Nvidia’s architectures aren’t directly comparable.

There's a B570 that is slightly cheaper with slightly lower specs. Both cards are based off the same BMG G21 GPU.

Intel claims that the B580 is 10% better than the Nvidia RTX4060 on average, at 1440p. It also claims to be $50 cheaper. Intel is focusing on the memory advantage that its new cards offer, especially for 1440p gaming and ray-tracing. The RTX 4060, after all, is a mere 8 GB with a 128 bit memory bus.

Intel claims that the B580, while slightly slower than the RTX 4060 at 1440p when ray tracing is disabled, can achieve 64% higher frame rates with the Ultra RT setting enabled.

Intel has tweaked the Battlemage architecture to achieve this performance compared to the original Alchemist graphics cards. The headlines then focus on higher shader usage and lower software overheads.

Details include a 3-way co-issue feature, 256 kB of L1 cache, an increase from 16 MB to 18 MB of L2 cache and a larger pixels cache. The RT engines are the most significant upgrade.

The performance of the traversal pipelines, box intersections, and BVH cache has been increased by 1.5x over Alchemist. Battlemage's ray-tracing seems to be very competitive.

Intel has also overhauled their XMX engines which are equivalent to Nvidia’s AI-accelerating Tensor Cores. They have a new version XeSS 2 of its upscaling platforms which includes frame gen technology. We'll cover this in a separate article.

Intel has announced that board makers such as Acer, Asrock Gunnir Maxsun Onix Sparkle, Onix, and Sparkle, will offer graphics cards at launch. It's a reasonable range, but not the most common role of AIBs.

The B580 is a very attractive GPU at $249, but it arrives so late in the current GPU cycle.

Nvidia is likely to release a new RTX-5060 by spring. The B580 has a limited window of opportunity. It would have been more interesting if it had arrived a year earlier, as we suspect Intel initially planned.

Intel is yet to announce a new Battlemage GPU that is faster. Rumours have been circulating for a while about a larger BMG-G31 with performance that can match or even surpass an RTX 4700. You might have expected a BMG G31 board to cost around $400, given the margin that the B580 is below the RTX 4160.

It could have been a killer if it had really beaten an RTX 4470 at that price. As it stands, there is no sign of this for now. We expect a new RTX-5070 with better performance in the New Year. Then, a BMG-G31-based board would have to either get faster or go cheaper in order to make sense.