Intel Arc B580 review: The first worthy budget GPU of the decade

Intel’s $249 Arc B580 is the graphics card we’ve begged for since the pandemic.

That was the headline I used for our initial coverage of Intel’s second-generation discrete graphics cards, because it’s true – at least on paper. Nvidia and AMD have been nerfing the memory system of sub-$350 graphics cards since the pandemic, limiting their best use to 1080p resolution. Meanwhile, gamers are increasingly buying 1440p monitors (a very tangible and affordable upgrade). Intel’s Arc B580 packs 12GB of VRAM to excel at 1440p gaming, with a $249 price point that undercuts its rivals’ entry-level 1080p offerings.

Now that we’ve spent a week testing and gaming on the Intel Arc B580, I can confirm it: Intel’s $249 Arc B580 really, truly is the graphics card we’ve begged for since the pandemic. It’s not perfect – performance lags behind the competition in a couple notable games, and we were hoping for slightly higher overall results – but in general, this graphics card outpunches the $300 Nvidia RTX 4060 and AMD Radeon RX 7600, with the lead growing even larger at 1440p.

This is a great graphics card for someone who wants to play modern PC games without mortgaging away their future. Check out the video above for a game-by-game, Photoshop-by-Photoshop analysis of our testing. Below, we’ll present the same benchmarks, but focused in on the five key things gamers need to know before buying the Intel Arc B580. Check out our initial Arc B580 announcement coverage if you want more nitty-gritty technical information on the guts inside Intel’s new Xe 2-powered GPU.

1. The Arc B580 really is built for 1440p gaming

Before we wade into benchmarks, let’s quickly touch on the Arc B580’s differentiator: This really is a 1440p graphics card for $250, in an era when Nvidia and AMD’s 1440p graphics cards typically go for $400 or more, and when spending less than that typically restricts you to 1080p gameplay.

The Intel Arc B580 is a delightful breath of fresh air in an otherwise brutal decade for PC gamers on a budget.

Delivering 1440p gaming requires two primary things: A GPU with enough oomph to power all those pixels (which the Arc B580 achieves), and a memory configuration with enough raw VRAM capacity and bandwidth to move those pixels.

The $300 Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and $270 AMD Radeon RX 7600 wield 8GB memory buffers that hold performance back even at 1080p in some games, paired with puny 128-bit memory buffers that additionally throttle 1440p gaming potential. Making matters worse, turning on ray tracing or frame generation features gobble up additional memory regardless of resolution. Sure, you can play some games on these at 1440p without issue, but they were designed from the ground up to run at 1080p.

Intel, on the other hand, actually designed this GPU to handle high-resolution 1440p gaming with aplomb. The Arc B580 packs an ample 12GB of GDDR6 memory, fed by a much-wider 192-bit bus. The enhanced memory system also helps when flipping on ray tracing or Intel’s XeSS upscaling technology.

As you’ll see in the benchmarks below, Intel’s beefed-up memory configuration can make a huge difference in performance in some games. As you’re browsing the slides below, don’t simply look at average frame rates – look at the minimum frame times, too, especially at 1440p. If a game runs out of VRAM capacity, it’ll need to hit your much-slower system memory instead, which can introduce stutters as frame rates drop in affected scenes. That’s reflected in the minimums below.

2. Intel Arc B580 performance benchmarks

We’ve tested the graphics cards above at both 1080p and 1440p resolution. We’ve included some Adobe Photoshop and Premiere results in the list, but will focus on gaming performance here. Tl;dr? The Arc B580 offers compelling high-quality gameplay at both 1440p and 1080p resolution, trading wins and losses with its rivals.

Intel’s pre-launch internal benchmarks (see below) claimed the Arc B580 was an average of 10 percent faster than Nvidia’s RTX 4060 at 1440p resolution. That’s definitely plausible, depending on the games selected, but results were much closer in our own tests, which include titles missing from Intel’s sampling and account for a range of game and engine types.

At 1080p resolution, the Arc B580 and RTX 4060 were in a dead-heat in our benchmarks – with literally the same total number of frames rendered across the nine games tested. At 1440p, the B580 was just 0.6 percent faster on average (albeit often with higher minimum frame times). If you omit Black Myth: Wukong and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (two games which Intel told us “are on the lower end of the titles vs. 4060 for us”), the lead opens up to 4 percent at both resolutions in our suite.

Intel’s debut Arc A-series graphics cards were initially plagued by bugs and poor performance, as you’d expect from a new entrant in the PC gaming field. Since those launched in late 2022, Intel released major driver updates at a torrid pace, bringing initially lagging DirectX 9 and DX11 performance up to par and transforming the overall Arc experience from a bug-riddled roller-coaster ride to a mostly smooth and stable cruise. But how do the next-gen Arc B580 drivers hold up?

Very, very well. We have no significant complaints from our testing session. It’s a huge improvement over the Arc A-series, in which I started my review with a detailed list of show-stopping bugs I’d encountered.

Intel’s done massive work here, and its software engineers deserve applause. That said, the experience wasn’t quite seamless, though none of these quibbles detracted from our overall enjoyment of the card.

Performance was significantly slower than rivals (but still solid) in Wukong and the latest Call of Duty, as mentioned above. We also experienced crashing in Star Wars Outlaws, but that was fixed before release. The new Indiana Jones game also suffered from poor performance, but there was no game-specific driver for it available to testers before release, so it’s an oddly timed edge case.

Other than those minor blips, tester (and PCWorld YouTube mastermind) Adam Patrick Murray ran into no problems, including with the new settings-stuffed Intel Graphics Software, which replaces last generation’s Arc Control Panel. Here are his experiential notes:

“Apart from the games in the test suite, I also played a bit of Baldur’s Gate 3, Silent Hill 2 remake, and Stalker 2, configured to how I would align settings if I owned this GPU. I found a comfortable experience (for me) at 1440p, high settings, and XeSS in Quality mode. So even in some of the newest games this felt like a solid 1440p card if you are okay with a bit of upscaling. I’ll be curious to hear other experiences to see if it falls down anywhere, but as long as you aren’t a day 1 gamer I have no problem recommending this to a normie.

As someone who games on the extremes (high-end desktop and handheld) I was honestly surprised by the performance out of this $250 card — especially in ray tracing.”

4. Intel’s Arc B580 ray tracing rocks

…speaking of!

Intel’s second-generation ray tracing hardware, which improved upon key technical aspects by 1.5x to 2x over the debut Arc cards, absolutely rocks. Ray tracing was already a strong point for first-gen Arc, and the ray tracing enhancements in the Xe 2 architecture put Intel’s GPU firmly ahead of Nvidia’s vaunted ray tracing in Cyberpunk and Returnal. Things pulled closer in Watch Dogs Legion with ray tracing on High, but the B580’s memory configuration helped it open a 7.5 percent lead at 1440p resolution.

AMD has been struggling to bring ray tracing performance up to par in its Radeon graphics cards, but it’s already a strength for Intel.

5. XeSS 2 Frame Generation and Xe Low Latency: Welcome, but not ready yet

Alongside the Arc B580, Intel is also launching a pair of new performance-boosting features designed to take on Nvidia’s DLSS 3: XeSS 2 Frame Generation and Xe Low Latency (XeLL).

These technologies work hand-in-hand, inserting AI-generated frames between “real” ones to improve visual smoothness, then using XeLL to reduce the latency introduced by those AI frames. It’s exactly how DLSS 3 and Nvidia Reflex holistically interact, but with a key twist: It’s done via AI models on the Xe 2 cores’ XMX extensions. Nvidia’s DLSS 3 requires dedicated Optical Flow Accelerator hardware, which is why it’s restricted to RTX 40-series GPUs. Intel, meanwhile, expects XeSS 2 to work just fine on older Arc A-series cards and even the “Battlemage” B-series GPUs embedded into Intel’s Lunar Lake laptops.

It’s exciting stuff, and considering how quickly Intel’s XeSS Super Resolution was adopted (it’s already in over 150 games), I’d hope it to start turning up in games quickly. But on December 13, launch day, only F1 24 is expected to ship with XeSS 2 – and a bug in a second pre-launch review driver accidentally erased the capability, leaving us unable to test it in time for this review.

Fortunately, the XeSS Super Resolution feature in those 150 games works just fine with the Arc B580, ready to deliver faster frame rates with little-to-no visual quality loss. I don’t think upscaling technologies like DLSS, XeSS, and AMD’s FSR look good at 1080p resolution – the reduced pixel count impacts final visual quality. But XeSS SR’s wider adoption will be a boon when playing at 1440p, driving performance even higher, and can help make intensive games falling under the 60fps mark more playable, regardless of resolution. It’s especially helpful when you flip on ray tracing, which can absolutely hammer frame rates.

Should you buy the Intel Arc B580?

If you’re looking for a solid all-around (new) graphics card for under $350, I strongly recommend giving Intel’s new GPU a long, hard look.

If you’re looking to play games without breaking the bank, Intel’s Arc B580 is a no-brainer. It handles 1440p gaming in style, unlike its rivals, and its 12GB of memory means you won’t need to turn down graphics settings at 1080p in cutting-edge games – something the 8GB GeForce RTX 4060 and Radeon 7600 can’t achieve. It uses a standard 8-pin power connector, can run even faster in games that support XeSS, and – shocker – is actually a reasonable size, in an era when GPUs often exhibit Godzilla-like proportions. Perhaps most importantly, the rampant bugs and performance issues that plagued first-gen Arc GPUs are gone now.

Opting for the Arc B580 means foregoing Nvidia’s vaunted DLSS and content creation capabilities, but those aren’t features many gamers will use on an entry-level graphics card. The 1440p gaming chops and 12GB of VRAM more than make up for those sacrifices, in my opinion. Even if Nvidia and AMD dropped prices to match the B580, Intel’s memory advantage would still give it the edge in my book – at least until those rivals unleash new mainstream next-gen GPUs sometime later next year.

While I was hoping that Intel’s card would be a bit faster across the board compared to the RTX 4060, what I said in the intro holds true: Intel’s $249 Arc B580 is the graphics card we’ve begged for since the pandemic. We haven’t seen a $250 graphics card this compelling this decade – you’d need to go all the way back to the halcyon days of the GTX 1060 and Radeon RX 480 to find a budget GPU with a value proposition this strong.

Yay competition!