Turnover at the top of the company isn't stopping Intel from launching new products: today the company announced the first of its next-generation B-series Intel Arc GPUs, the Arc B580 and Arc B570.
Both are definitely mid-range graphics cards that will compete with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD's RX 7600 series, but Intel is pricing them competitively: $249 for a B580 with 12 GB of RAM and $219 for a B570 with 10 GB of RAM. The B580 will launch on December 13, while the B570 won't be available until January 16.
The two cards are Intel's first dedicated GPUs based on the next-generation “Battlemage” architecture, a successor to the “Alchemist” architecture used in the A-series cards. Intel's Core Ultra 200 laptop processors were the first products shipped with Battlemage, although they used an integrated version with fewer Intel's Xe cores and no dedicated memory. Both B-series GPUs use silicon manufactured using a 5nm TSMC process, an upgrade from the 6nm process used for the A-series; at the time of writing none have been integrated or dedicated Arc GPUs are manufactured by one of Intel's factories.
Both cards use a single 8-pin power connector, at least in Intel's reference design; Intel is offering a first-party limited-edition version of the B580, while it appears that partners such as Asus, ASRock, Gunnir, Maxsun, Onix and Sparkle will be responsible for the B570.
The Arc B580 will be available in a limited edition design from Intel.
Intel
The Arc B580 will be available in a limited edition design from Intel.
Intel
Intel's partners will provide the remaining cards, including all versions of the B570. The B580 and B570 will cost $249 and $219 respectively.
Intel
Intel's partners will provide the remaining cards, including all versions of the B570. The B580 and B570 will cost $249 and $219 respectively.
Intel
The Arc B580 will be available in a limited edition design from Intel.
Intel
Intel's partners will provide the remaining cards, including all versions of the B570. The B580 and B570 will cost $249 and $219 respectively.
Intel
Compared to the original Arc GPUs, both Battlemage cards should benefit from the work Intel has put into its graphics drivers over the past two years – a combination of performance improvements plus translation layers for older versions of DirectX have all improved Arc's performance quite a bit in comparison with the original Arc GPUs. older games since late 2022. Hopefully buyers won't have to wait months or years to get good performance from the Battlemage cards.
The new cards also come with XeSS 2, the next-generation version of Intel's upscaling technology (analogous to DLSS for Nvidia cards and FSR for AMD's). Like DLSS 3 and FSR 3, one of XeSS 2's key additions is a frame generation feature that can interpolate additional frames to insert between the frames actually rendered by the graphics card. These types of technologies tend to work best when the cards are already running at a reasonably high frame rate, but when they work well they can lead to smoother-looking gameplay. A related technology, Xe Low Latency, aims to reduce the increase in latency associated with frame generation technologies, similar to Nvidia's Reflex and AMD's Anti-Lag.
