Intel has announced its first “Battlemage” discrete graphics cards, the Arc B580 and B570. As well as being the fastest Intel GPUs ever made, the $249 B580 and $219 B570 are also equipped with Intel’s second-generation XeSS upscaling with frame generation and latency reduction. That’s a promising recipe, especially if Intel is able to continue shoring up its driver support for newer games as we approach the release dates of December 13th (B580) and January 16th (B570).
Before we get into the specs and features, let’s briefly recap the Arc story thus far. Intel released its first Arc discrete graphics cards in 2022, beginning with the Arc A380 and following up with the more powerful A750 and A770. The A380 was more of a proving ground, a novelty that offered excellent media capabilities but little raw grunt, while the A750 and A770 continue to offer reasonable value at roughly RTX 3060 levels of performance.
The new B580 and B570 are aiming higher, with a mandate to perform well at a 1440p resolution and ultra settings. This makes sense, given that high refresh rate 1440p displays have now hit mainstream prices – eg you can pick up a 27-inch 1440p 165Hz monitors for less than £150, making it the new baseline.
According to Intel’s numbers, the B580 Limited Edition (equivalent to an AMD reference or Nvidia Founders Edition card) is on average 24 percent faster than the old A750 at 1440p and ultra settings. That includes sub-60fps averages in games like Dragon’s Dogma 2, The Last of Us Part 1, A Plague Tale: Requiem and Total War Three Kingdoms; circa 100fps averages in games like Returnal, Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3 – all with XeSS; and circa 165fps averages in Fortnite, F1 24, Diablo 4 and Doom Eternal – all with XeSS once again.