guru3d Intel Arc B580 Review

[UltraMega]

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The ARC B580 is a product series that feels familiar as we have seen cards performing at this level for many years now, still, it is something new and refreshing, not in the first place because it is fabbed by an underdog in the dedicated graphics card industry. Performance matches its pricing and that is a good thing, you can move away from Full HD and play games at WQHD. Of course, you can also do that with competing cards, but what does help is the nice framebuffer of 12GB VRAM this graphics card gets. The performance is certainly good enough for that monitor resolution, and having had a taste of XeSS2+FG, leaves us with a desire to learn more. Hopefully, it'll get more widespread tech in games. It is something we all will need to get used to, deep learning technologies that will assist raw game rendering. It's okay as long as the image quality hit can be as small as possible. The Limited Edition ARC B580 as a card is a good-looking product, and it really runs very silently. At temps in the 65-70 degrees range, it runs nicely chilled as well. power consumption overall is a little so-so, but fine otherwise. We doubt many would be bothered. So there you have it, at $250 bucks it's a very decent product. The ARC software suite is getting better and better as well with broader and active AAA game release support, and that is so important as the hardware is just one thing, the software side can be just as important. Intel really made big steps forward there. Overall if you're in need of a product like this, we don't see a reason not to purchase it as it ticks all boxes. Intel does need to check into idle power consumption though. 

https://www.guru3d.com/review/review-intel-arc-b580-limited-edition-graphics-card/

 

 

 

Feels like a pointless product to me. Price isn't anything special for the performance, which is not very interesting at all.

[UltraMega]

 

 

[Slaughtahouse]

I know it’s not earth shattering but it’s nice to see mid/ low range get competitive. More VRAM, more performance, less features, less price. I also would expect that it drops in price when Blackwell releases it’s mid (low) range next summer. I anticipate Blackwell to have new features (decompression engine etc.) and it will be hard to compete on anything other than price once it drops.

 

I do feel it at least offers more flexibility to those on a budget. Curious if/when the Battlemage 7XX series releases if it surpasses the 4070 Super at a cost of $400 or less. It’s always a moving goal post but more competition is good. 

 

Hardware Unboxed did a good revisit on Intel GPUs (Alchemist) this year and found in most instances the driver issues are solved when compared to launch. Given their position (youth) in the market and how quickly they’ve been able to iterate and deliver features like XeSS and good RT, I suspect Intel will pass AMD on the GPU mindshare front within 4-6 years (2-3 gens) at this pace.

Edited Friday at 00:18 by Slaughtahouse

[Fluxmaven]

3 hours ago, UltraMega said:

Feels like a pointless product to me. Price isn't anything special for the performance, which is not very interesting at all.

 

So it's faster and cheaper than the cards it set out to be faster and cheaper than and this somehow makes it a pointless product? 

 

I know you're going to say "people should just buy a used XYZ on ebay if they're on a budget"... Some people (like relatives that buy them as gifts) don't want a used card for little Timmy's Christmas present. Or people that really feel more comfortable buying new for the warranty. 

[UltraMega]

1 hour ago, Slaughtahouse said:

I know it’s not earth shattering but it’s nice to see mid/ low range get competitive. More VRAM, more performance, less features, less price. I also would expect that it drops in price when Blackwell releases it’s mid (low) range next summer. I anticipate Blackwell to have new features (decompression engine etc.) and it will be hard to compete on anything other than price once it drops.

 

I do feel it at least offers more flexibility to those on a budget. Curious if/when the Battlemage 7XX series releases if it surpasses the 4070 Super at a cost of $400 or less. It’s always a moving goal post but more competition is good. 

 

Hardware Unboxed did a good revisit on Intel GPUs (Alchemist) this year and found in most instances the driver issues are solved when compared to launch. Given their position (youth) in the market and how quickly they’ve been able to iterate and deliver features like XeSS and good RT, I suspect Intel will pass AMD on the GPU mindshare front within 4-6 years (2-3 gens) at this pace.

 

That's a bold prediction. Intel is likely selling these for little to no profit right now to break into the market. They're market presence is virtually nothing right now. Intel would need to be able to sustain very low margin for long enough to catch up and given how things are going so far, I don't see them surpassing AMD in the GPU market in the foreseeable future. 

 

AMD was caught off guard by AI/NPU integration with GPUs, but I have no doubt their next line of products will remedy that. If rumors are to be believed, RT performance will see a big uplift as well.

 

Intel GPU dies are huge, much bigger than equivalent Nvidia and AMD cards. They still have a long way to go. 

Edited Friday at 01:27 by UltraMega

[UltraMega]

20 minutes ago, Fluxmaven said:

 

So it's faster and cheaper than the cards it set out to be faster and cheaper than and this somehow makes it a pointless product? 

 

I know you're going to say "people should just buy a used XYZ on ebay if they're on a budget"... Some people (like relatives that buy them as gifts) don't want a used card for little Timmy's Christmas present. Or people that really feel more comfortable buying new for the warranty. 

I mean, it's a win over Nvidia's 4060 GPUs I guess, but since everyone considers the 4060 to be a rediculously overpriced and underpowered GPU, it's not much of a win. If Intel wants to gain any ground they need to put out a GPU people actually want to buy and a 1080p/60 GPU for $250 is pretty underwhelming here at the end of 2024.

 

If their line up is going to be so limited, I wish they had targeted the price performance sweet spot of something in the 4070 range.

 

It's technically a win at its price point I guess, just not one likely to gain any real traction if the only buyers are ones looking to get a slightly cheaper 4060 level entry card. Very few people buy cards that cheap these days, and if they do they probably will consider buying used.

 

A real win here would be a product that excites people at a competitive price and not an entry level card that's sure to be largely ignored.

 

 

If you bought this for little Timmy as a gift over a slightly more expensive AMD or Nvidia card, you might be setting little Timmy up for a bad time when he tries to play a game that runs into the growing pains that these cards are sure to still have. Drivers have improved a lot but there still far from being products a novice user could reliably use. As soon as little Timmy wants to play an older game or a game that Intel didn't focus on fixes for...

Edited Friday at 01:33 by UltraMega

[UltraMega]

I hadn't watched the gamers nexus review when I posted earlier and now that I have, I am slightly more impressed than I initially was based on skimming some charts. It's a good product, but it's still an entry level card in a market that is skewing more and more away from entry level cards so it's just not very interesting to me. But if they can eventually do something similar at a higher performance/price point, that would be very interesting. a $350-$400 card that traded blows with a 4070 would be a huge win. 

 

But even if Intel released a few more GPUs that were at the performance level gamers are more largely interested in, I still wonder if Intel is actually making any money or just undercutting the competition and taking a loss to get into the market. If intel gains traction, are we going to see much price competition from AMD and Nvidia or would Intel just start charging more once they build up a bit of a reliable reputation? 

 

Ultimately the thing we need most of all from Intel is real price competition further up the stack.  

[Sir Beregond]

It's good to see more entries in the sub $300 market. Perhaps it's not groundbreaking, but the sub $300 market is the mainstream market, just look at any Steam hardware survey top 10 GPU's. It's good to have more cards in this space.

 

Problem Intel is going to have is competition from mostly AMD come next year. AMD's stated goal with RDNA4 is to capture market share and that is going to definitely have to include the mainstream $300 and below market imo in addition to the mid-range $500-$600 market. This is going to put Intel's offering in an odd spot performance wise depending on what kind of uplift we see in this segment with next gen.

 

I also have to wonder if Intel is making any money off of the B580. The BMG-G21 die for the B580 is 272mm2. The RTX 4060 on the other hand is using the AD107 die which is 159mm2. Both are using versions of TSMC 5nm. This means that Intel is using approximately 71% more silicon to beat the 4060 by about 10%. That can't be good for their bottom line on these cards.

 

I really hope Intel keeps at it, but now with Pat Gelsinger gone, I'm not so sure about the longterm future of Arc.

Edited Monday at 17:55 by Sir Beregond

[UltraMega]

DF actually talked about the die size specifically: