Turnover at the top of the company isn't stopping Intel from launching new products: today the company announces the first of its next-generation Intel Arc B-series GPUs, the Arc B580 and Arc B570.
Both are decidedly 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 12GB of RAM and $219 for a B570 with 10GB of RAM. RAM. The B580 launches on December 13, while the B570 won't be available until January 16.
The two cards are Intel's first dedicated GPUs based on its next-generation “Battlemage” architecture, successor to the “Alchemist” architecture used in A-series cards. The Intel Core Ultra 200 laptop processors were its first products to feature They shipped with Battlemage, although they used an integrated version with fewer Intel Xe cores and no dedicated memory. Both B-series GPUs use silicon manufactured on a 5nm TSMC process, an upgrade from the 6nm process used for the A-series; At the time of writing this article, no either The dedicated Arc GPUs have been 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 its own limited edition version of the B580, while it looks like partners like 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 partners will handle the other cards, including all versions of the B570. The B580 and B570 will launch for $249 and $219, respectively.
Intel
Intel partners will handle the other cards, including all versions of the B570. The B580 and B570 will launch for $249 and $219, respectively. Intel
The Arc B580 will be available in a limited edition design from Intel. Intel
Intel partners will handle the other cards, including all versions of the B570. The B580 and B570 will launch for $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 improved performance quite a bit from Arc in older games from late 2022. Hopefully, buyers won't have to wait months or years to get good performance from 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). Like DLSS 3 and FSR 3, one of the major additions to XeSS 2 is a frame-generating feature that can interpolate additional frames to insert them between the frames that are actually being 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 gameplay. A related technology, Xe Low Latency, aims to reduce the latency increase that comes with frame generation technologies, similar to Nvidia's Reflex and AMD's Anti-Lag.