Intel has officially announced the first video cards of the Battlemage family – mid-range models Arc B570 and Arc B580 costing $219 and $249, respectively. The new items will go on sale on January 16, 2025 and December 13, 2024, respectively. The manufacturer claims that they offer maximum performance for their price.
Image source: Intel
The new Intel graphics cards are based on the same Xe2 Battlemage architecture as the integrated graphics on Intel Lunar Lake chips for laptops, but offer a much higher number of cores, up to 12 GB of video memory and power of up to 190 W. The Arc B580 model, according to Intel, is on average 10% faster than the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 ($299), and is also faster than the AMD Radeon RX 7600 ($269). Although sometimes new products are inferior to competitors.
The Arc B580 runs a wide range of games faster than the RTX 4060 at 1440p resolution and high graphics quality settings, the manufacturer claims. The new product, paired with the flagship Intel Core i9-14900K processor, has enough resources to stay above 60 frames per second in Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, Returnal and The Witcher 3, which the GeForce RTX 4060 is not capable of.
The manufacturer offers clear advantages in situations where competing video cards are limited by memory capacity: the Arc B580 has 12 GB of GDDR6, and the GeForce RTX 4060 has 8 GB. In Forza Motorsport, the Nvidia graphics card beats the Intel with 86 frames per second versus 77 FPS, but with ray tracing enabled, the Intel wins with 64 frames per second versus 57 FPS. Intel did not provide comparison results between the Arc B570 and the Radeon RX 7600.
The younger model Intel Arc B570 differs from the older Arc B580 in the number of Xe2 cores and ray tracing units reduced from 20 to 18, the clock frequency reduced from 2670 to 2500 MHz, the memory capacity reduced from 12 to 10 GB, and the bus width was reduced from 192 to 160 bits , and throughput – from 456 to 380 GB/s. Finally, the power was reduced from 190 to 150 watts. In both cases, one 8-pin connector is used for power, the connection is made via the PCIe 4.0 x8 bus, hardware acceleration is supported AV1, HEVC, AVC, VP9 and XAVC-H, there are three DisplayPort 2.1 and one HDMI 2.1.
Intel intends to release the Arc B580 Limited Edition itself, with two fans, one 8-pin power connector and “whisper-quiet” operation; Acer, ASRock, Gunnir, Sparkle, Maxsun and Onix will release their own versions of the new products. The company says the Xe2 architecture offers a 70% performance gain per core.
Intel also introduced a new version of the XeSS 2 AI scaling system – an analogue of Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR now supports frame generation and Xe Low Latency mode, which compensates for delays when this function is enabled. XeSS 2 support is promised for the following games: F1 24, Marvel Rivals, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Killing Floor 3, Citadels, Dying Light 2, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions, Ascendant and RoboCop: Rogue City.