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

At a glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

• Fast frame rates at high visual quality settings
• 12GB memory and bandwidth for 1440p gaming
• Low, low $249 price
• Superb ray tracing for price class (beats RTX 4060)
• Bugs and performance oddities from 1st-gen Arc GPUs have been fixed
• Uses standard 8-pin power connector
• XeSS in over 150 games
• Well-designed, fairly compact Intel Limited Edition model

Cons

• XeSS 2 and Xe Low Latency features need time to be implemented in games
• Slightly higher power draw than rival budget GPUs (but still acceptable)
• Lower than expected performance in COD: Black Ops 6 and Black Myth: Wukong

Our Verdict

With 12GB of memory, superb ray tracing chops, a single 8-pin power connector, and the ability to play 1440p games without severe compromise, Intel’s $249 Arc B580 is the budget graphics card gamers have been begging for since the pandemic. It’s a superb option for gamers who don’t want to spend $400+ on a GPU.

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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.

Adam Patrick Murray / Foundry

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

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.

Dig deeper into the benchmarks, however, and you’ll see Intel pulling a huge lead over the RTX 4060 in Cyberpunk 2077, F1 24, and Returnal. In games where it draws roughly even with the 4060 at 1080p, like Watch Dogs Legion, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, and Rainbow Six Siege (DX11 mode), it pulls ahead at 1440p because of its more capable memory configuration.

Bottom line? Expect the Intel Arc B580 to deliver roughly RTX 4060 performance and you’ll be happy. Some games respond really, really favorably to Intel’s architecture and far outpace the 4060, however – and if you plan on gaming at 1440p, the Arc B580 has a clear edge.

Do note that Intel’s Arc GPUs require a CPU and motherboard with PCIe Resizable BAR enabled for optimal performance. Any PCs from this decade should support the technology, but if you’re looking to drop this into an older PC (say, one with a GTX 1060 inside), expect to see frame rates lower than the ones shown here.

3. How do the drivers hold up?

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 PC