Intel unveils Arc B-Series graphics cards; Battlemage enters the budget graphics card arena

The new Intel Arc B580 and B570 GPUs offer what the company says is best-in-class value for performance at price points that are accessible to most users.

Intel has certainly had its woes of late, but compared to the prices we’re used to seeing graphics cards run out recently, there’s no doubt the two new Arc B-Series cards from the company are competitive. The Arc B580 features 12GB of VRAM and debuts at $248, while the B570 comes equipped with 10GB of VRAM and will retail for $219. 

Of course, they’re aimed at the gaming market first and foremost, but are also designed to accelerate AI workloads which makes them useful elsewhere too. The company reckons that Battlemage's second-generation Xe-cores deliver the compute capabilities required for modern workloads and include high-performance XMX AI engines. New Xe-cores are supported by more capable ray tracing units, better mesh shading performance and improved support of key graphics functions to significantly increase performance efficiency with the latest game engines.

The company’s XeSS 2 super sampling and upscaling tech for supported games now includes three technologies: XeSS Super Resolution, XeSS Frame Generation and Xe Low Latency. XeSS Super Resolution is the key technology that underpinned first-generation XeSS, which has offered AI-based upscaling for more than two years and now supports more than 150 games. New AI-powered XeSS Frame Generation adds interpolated frames using optical flow and motion vector reprojection to provide higher fluidity gaming. And new Xe Low Latency integrates with the game engine to provide faster response to gamers’ inputs. With all three technologies activated, XeSS 2 is capable of increasing the frames-per-second output by up to 3.9x to deliver high performance in demanding AAA games.

Compared with the previous generation, the Intel Arc B-Series GPUs offer 70% better performance per Xe-core3 and 50% more performance per watt. The B580 GPU, when compared to the Intel Arc A750 GPU, is on average 24%5 faster at 1440p with some games running up to 78% faster. When compared to the competition, the Intel Arc B580 GPU offers up to 32% better performance-per-dollar.

These are, of course, all lab results; we'll have to wait till the real world benchmarks start to come in before being able to properly assess this performance.

The GPUs also include expansive hardware encode and decode codec support, such as AV1, H.265 including 4:2:2 10-bit, H.264 and VP9. But yes, the target resolution here is 1440p

Pricing and availability

The Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition graphics card and models from add-in board partners Acer, ASRock, GUNNIR, ONIX Technology, MAXSUN and Sparkle will be available starting Dec 13 from $249. Intel Arc B570 graphics cards from the same add-in board partners will be available starting Jan 16, 2025, from $219. 

tl;dr

• The Intel Arc B-Series GPUs offer a best-in-class value with the B580 at $248 (12GB VRAM) and the B570 at $219 (10GB VRAM), making them accessible to most users.
• Featuring Intel Xe Matrix Extensions (XMX), the GPUs support XeSS 2 technology that improves performance, visual fluidity, and responsiveness for both gaming and AI workloads.
• The new GPUs deliver 70% better performance per Xe-core and 50% more performance per watt compared to the previous generation, with the B580 GPU achieving up to 32% better performance-per-dollar compared to competitors.
• The GPUs support a wide range of hardware encode and decode codecs including AV1 and H.265, with a target resolution for optimal performance set at 1440p.