Intel's Arc B580: Game-Changing Budget GPU Performance

Intel's Arc A750 delivers exceptional 1080p and 1440p gaming performance at a budget-friendly price.

### Intel's Arc B580: A Game-Changer in Budget GPUs
* 🎉 Intel has finally released a competitive budget GPU, the Arc B580, which features **12GB of VRAM** and offers impressive performance, **outpacing the RTX 4060** at both **1080p and 1440p resolutions**.
* 🚀 This new GPU marks a **significant improvement for Intel**, which struggled with buggy drivers in its earlier generation, leading to **low sales and speculation about its future** in the GPU market.
* 💪 The B580 not only competes well against AMD and Nvidia's offerings but also shows a **commanding 55% generational uplift**, making it a viable choice for gamers looking to **upgrade from older models like the GTX 1660**.
* 🎮 In benchmarks, the B580 performs admirably in games like *Red Dead Redemption 2*, where it **rivals the RX 7700 XT**, a **$400 card**, although it faces challenges in titles like *The Last of Us Part One*.
* 📈 Intel's Arc A750 also demonstrates strong capabilities at 1440p, achieving a **20% lead over the RTX 4060**, showcasing the potential for **high-refresh-rate gaming**.
* ⚡ While the B580 excels in many areas, it still struggles with **ray tracing performance** compared to Nvidia, and requires a motherboard that supports **Resizable BAR**.
* 🔧 Despite some drawbacks, including power consumption concerns, the B580's performance and features make it a **worthy contender in the budget GPU market**, providing gamers with a **much-needed upgrade option**.
* 💰 Overall, Intel's efforts in the Arc B580 represent a **significant leap forward**, creating excitement for budget-conscious gamers eager for **modern graphics performance without breaking the bank**.

I can't believe it! After Nvidia and AMD completely abandoned the sub-$300 price point or gave us intentionally nerfed options, Intel has finally done it: they released the first good budget GPU in over five years. It doesn't cut any corners; it's got 12GB of VRAM,

meaning that new games like Indiana Jones will run properly. It's relatively efficient, and best of all, it's got raw performance that beats the RTX 4060 handily at both 1080p and 1440p. If I had scripted Intel's press conference for

this thing, it probably would have gone something like this:  'It's been a difficult journey to get here for Team Blue. Their first generation had famously buggy drivers, with some games running poorly or not at all, which led to such low sales figures that the

department has been the subject of near-constant speculation that it would be cut. But believe it or not, they have squashed most of the bugs—most of them. We'll talk about that later. First, the TL;DR: Last time we asked viewers to consider buying Intel Arc because we

were desperate for them to emerge as a disruptor in the GPU duopoly; this time, we're asking you to consider Intel Arc because it's freaking awesome. To the point where I would say that it is the only choice for gamers who want to spend

$450 to $700 on a tower, or for those folks who have waited so patiently for an upgrade to their faithful GTX 1660 or 10-series card. It's time to bag up that old GPU... wait, wait, don't throw me out yet!

Let me out! Oh, no, sell to our sponsor, Jawa instead! Why let your old hardware collect dust when it can collect cash? Check out Jawa below and get an extra $10 on top of your base offer until the end of this year. Let's start at 1080p.

Where AMD and Nvidia are more than happy to gouge you for the luxury of being able to play First City in Cyberpunk. The B580 makes an impressive debut, running neck and neck with the 4060 Ti 16GB, a card that retails for

$450. You heard me; this one is 80% more expensive. And check out the B580's direct competition: the $300 460 and the $250 RX 7600. They're behind by nearly 15%, and Intel's lead increases in Red

Dead Redemption 2, where improvements to Vulkan support have lifted the fortunes of even their last-generation cards and brought the B580 in line with the 7700 XT, a $400 GPU. This kind of utter dominance, though, isn't across the board. In The

Last of Us Part One, the B580 falls back in line, but even this poor result has them beating Nvidia and AMD's current-generation price competitors. In F1 23, AMD takes the lead, but they've historically performed really well on the track. And in the old but gold Shadow

of the Tomb Raider, the B580 barely inches past the RTX 460 in average FPS and loses in 1% lows, which we classify as a loss. In Returnal, the B580 is neck and neck with the 4060 Ti and the 6700.

The RX 7700 XT only takes a clear L from the RX 7700 XT, which again, I remind you, is a $400 card. And then finally, in Atomic Heart, the RX 6800 loses some of its glorious wind, but hey, the most expensive card on the charts was bound to win at least one game, wasn't it?

Looking at the overall picture, Intel, you've outdone yourselves. You've pulled off a commanding generational uplift of 55% and beaten your old flagship by more than 20%. You've fallen shy of the RTX 4060 Ti, but the

bottom line is, if gamers out there are looking to upgrade their aging GPUs for high refresh rate 1080p gaming, you've given us something to finally recommend to them—not just point at the least worst thing, but to recommend to them. This is a truly incredible achievement

for Intel, and they did a lot to make it happen. Their new Arc A770—so interestingly, they don't call it a GPU—leaves no stone unturned in the search for performance improvements. They've jumped to a new process node and made

several architectural and driver overhauls that Intel claims gave them a 70% improvement in performance per core and a 50% energy improvement over last gen. Which makes me wonder: why did they hold back? If 20 Xe-cores is good, then 32 cores on an Arc A770 would be better.

Speaking of bigger, nearly 37% of Steam users are gaming at a resolution greater than 1080p these days, and that number keeps growing as 1440p and 4K monitors continue to come down in price. So can Intel compete at 1440p as well?

The short answer is yes. Across our suite of benchmarks, the Arc A750 overtakes the RX 6700 XT and narrows the gap with the RTX 4060 Ti to just a few percent. As for Intel's promised 10% lead over the RTX 4060, well, it appears they were actually being

modest. Across our game selection, we found a lead of 20%, though it is worth noting that this will vary depending on game selection. Starting with the famously VRAM-hungry *The Last of Us Part I*, the Arc A750 holds its position on our

chart, embarrassing Nvidia again. The Arc A750's 1% lows best the RTX 4060's average FPS. *Shadow of the Tomb Raider* demonstrates just what an incredible generational leap Intel has pulled off here, and it seems like something about *Returnal* really likes Intel because all

of our Team Blue cards get a nice little bump in the rankings. I'm kind of running out of ways to say Intel's doing well, so...um...in *Red Dead Redemption 2*, Intel did blow, and in *Cyberpunk 2077*, they blew away the competition while making it glaringly

obvious just how overdue the GTX 1060 and the GTX 1650 were for a viable modern 1440p upgrade. With strong, if not mind-blowing, performance in both *Atomic Heart* and *F1 2023*, it's clear that Intel has achieved what they set out to do: made a killer

value 1080p gaming card that's also capable of 1440p. There are some caveats; even Intel admits that they don't win in every game, and a motherboard with support for Resizable BAR is mandatory for Arc GPUs. The Arc A750 isn't a

Top-of-the-line benchmark buster. So if you have a higher-tier older card, like a 3060 Ti, you shouldn't feel compelled to upgrade here. But as far as downsides go, those are pretty minor, and there's more to like than just the raw performance.

Let's talk about ray tracing, which is a little more relevant these days all of a sudden than it used to be, especially when you consider the games are starting to list ray tracing as a minimum requirement. While we didn't have time to develop a test for our boy Indie, we did

check out the RT performance in a few other games. Tracing those rays still results in a significant performance hit, but Nvidia's mature and well-supported RT tech allows them to beat the 7600 in a big way in Atomic Heart at 1080p in

Returnal. The 7600 catches right back up to the 4060 Ti but falls back into the pack in F1 23. Overall, you can have a solid 60+ FPS ray tracing gaming experience, assuming you're willing to fiddle with the settings just a little.

Bit. Speaking of which, at 1440p, that's beyond the reach of pretty much every card we've tested today, the entire lot failing to break 60 FPS average in any title. But the extra VRAM on the 7600 earns a sizable lead over

the 4060 in Returnal and in F1 23, even if it can't pull out a win in Atomic Heart. AMD's RX 7600...it's basically crying in the corner trying to figure out why it's even here. And if you're wondering where

The flagship ray tracing title, Cyberpunk, is well... uh, we had some Intel problems. It seems to not like running at ultra ray tracing settings on CPUs with 3D VCache. But before you start hanging Intel about game compatibility, they are aware and they are working on it. Look, Mom, we made...

the patch notes. And since the launch of Arc, compatibility has massively improved. Hardware Unboxed recently showed in a test of 250 games that 233 were completely playable. There were still issues, and some of those were in major titles that took a lot longer to fix than we would

have liked. But hopefully, Intel will continue this upward trend in compatibility. Now, knowing the price and the 1440p performance numbers, you wouldn't expect this to be a 4K gaming card, and you'd be right. It's not a 4K

card, even in low settings. In Cyberpunk, we don't see great frame rates, at least not natively. But Intel's got some more tricks up their sleeves. Desperate to not completely miss the boat on the AI boom, Intel has packed some juicy AI into the

A580 in order to up its performance. Oh, I guess if I'm going to talk about AI, I might as well dress the part with my tech bro vest from LTTstore.com. Intel's AI-powered render enhancement sauce comes in the form of XeSS 2. XeSS 2 has three main parts: an AI

upscaler that renders the game at a lower resolution, then uses AI to upscale to your display resolution; XeSS frame generation, which creates extra frames by interpolating visual and in-game vector data and then taking the two frames and making a midpoint to enhance

animation smoothness and a latency reduction component that helps to cancel out some of the extra latency from the aforementioned frame generation. In fewer words, they've invented Nvidia DLSS, Nvidia Frame Generation, and Nvidia Reflex. And what's nice is that, unlike the time that

AMD invented it, Nvidia Reflex with anti-lag, plus Intel has implemented this in a way that the game developer bakes it into the game, meaning you won't get permabanned for turning it on. We're not going to be doing a deep dive into image quality at

this time, but we will be looking at performance and we will make some anecdotal remarks about image quality.  XS has already proven itself to be a solid upscaling technology, and XS 2 successfully builds upon that foundation. When turning on super sampling to its

highest quality level in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p, Intel wins an FPS thanks to the raw performance advantage that they already had, but their super resolution solution doesn't scale as well. Nvidia sees a performance uplift of 42 and 32%

in the lows and averages respectively, while Intel only gets around a 20% boost. We see the same trend at 4K. The 7800 XT doesn't gain as much performance from XS as Nvidia does from DLSS, but wins by just being a more powerful card.

The 4060, though, it doesn't even hit 30 FPS here. But the story changes a bit in F1 2024, the only title currently available for us to test XS 2's Frame Generation, and this is where things get wacky. In this game, the upscales are better matched, but in

Frame generation, it's a blowout! Intel is introducing way more generated frames, with performance skyrocketing to 70% over the upscaled result and double over native rendering. It's almost indistinguishable from native rendering unless you really know what to look for.

And if you ignore those tire artifacts that arise from the upscaling (not the frame generation), it's weird. It has doubled the FPS with barely a drop in quality. Heck, you can even get over 100 FPS at 4K with DLSS turned on. Granted, Intel probably

worked pretty closely with the developers to make sure that this launch title would leave a good impression. But a good impression is a good impression. While Intel pitched this as a gaming card first and foremost, they did include some other value-adds like their enhanced media engine that now supports more

codecs than Nvidia or AMD in modern AV1 encoding. We can see a clear generational uplift, but Intel can't quite match the speed of Nvidia's NVENC encoder. And it's worth noting here, by the way, that while AMD does compete on this chart, it does

so by outputting the wrong resolution (1920x1082), and yes, that is a hardware-level problem—yikes! In the more ubiquitous H.264, the Arc A750 snatches the crown, although the margins are pretty small across the board here. Now, thanks to

their optics rendering, Blender sees some good old-fashioned Nvidia domination, at least on the cards that have RT cores. Interestingly, the Arc A750 performs significantly worse than Intel's last-gen cards. Intel told us this is expected but didn't really go into why. Our best

I guess, then, it's due to the relatively smaller number of XE cores on this card compared to last gen, but that didn't slow it down in gaming, so yay! Moving into our AI testing, NVIDIA's dominant position means that most AI software is developed with CUDA

in mind, making it easy for folks at home to get up and running quickly. The good news is things are getting easier for AMD and Intel users, and if you want to run some computer vision, large language models, or image generation at home, you can probably get it working on your non-

NVIDIA GPU in a few extra steps. Generationally, Intel has made a massive leap in performance, taking the lead in our Stable Diffusion image generation benchmark by a pretty big margin. In computer vision, it loses to the 4060, although just barely. So, if you can get

it running, it works great, as long as you don't mind using a bunch of power to generate a portrait of your ant as an actual ant. Speaking of power, we haven't even talked about power yet. The physical PCB of our card is stinky, and Intel

takes advantage of this by implementing a new flow-through cooler design. Thermals are well under control, with the hotspot on the Arc 580 never passing 76° in either synthetic or gaming workloads. The Arc 580 is targeting a TDP of 190 watts; that's

25 watts more than the RX 7600 and 4060 Ti, and 75 watts more than the 4060 non-Ti. So it's clear that, even with all of their improvements, Intel does have a ways to go, with NVIDIA pulling off a clean victory when it comes to

Performance per watt—even if Nvidia doesn't seem to understand what performance per dollar is—the B580 uses just one PCIe 8-pin for power, so you won't need to upgrade your power supply. That is, unless you have a power supply that is less than 600W. Even though it

should only draw a max of 225 watts with that power connector, we saw some transient spikes up to 241 watts in F1. That is significantly higher than Intel's advertised 190 watts. So, in conclusion, maybe it's just because it's been

so long since we've seen a great budget card, but man, I'm excited! Like, how many times have I had to say, 'Well, you could buy this shiny new thing, but it kind of sucks, and you'd be way better off going with something last-gen or secondhand or

just not upgrading at all'? Well, not today! I mean, eBay deals obviously still exist, but this is a new GPU that doesn't suck, with modern features, and it's worthy of celebration. Even if Intel is a little late to the party, see, the thing is, AMD and Nvidia are poised to release

their next generation of GPUs early next year, so it isn't out of the question for a couple of companies that have had their stock prices double or 10x to make a move to nuke Arc B-series from orbit. Also, the looming threat of tariffs

could impact the affordability of these cards. But hey, it's going to be a pretty sweet ride up until that time. It's a great GPU that will give you great performance without destroying your wallet. Hold on, scrap that bulky wallet anyway, because a sponsor, Ridge, is having

A holiday sale! You can get up to 40% off. Lots of people here already use Rich, and I'm going to buy some for people who don't. But Linus is paying for it. Well, Linus is filming on set. I've been hiding under here, just as expected. His old

buckeye wallet fell out just like that! I cookie shop at rich.com and recycle Linus's old wallet. Oh well, thank you! This is for me. Thank you! Now you know how to be popular. Check out Rich's holiday sale; we'll have the link in the video

description. If you guys enjoyed this video, go check out our review of the original Arc. The benchmarks and graphs aren't really relevant other than to give you the context for how far we have come. This is truly a wonderful achievement for Intel and for the world.  Canada 249

THE ARC B580 IS ACTUALLY GREAT & AFFORDABLE

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Linus Tech Tips

Intel Arc A750: A budget GPU that surpasses expectations

Intel releases a budget GPU with 12GB VRAM, good performance, and efficiency, unlike previous attempts.

Overcomes previous issues with buggy drivers.

Recommended for gamers upgrading from GTX 1660 or 10-series cards.

Considered the best option for budget tower builds.

Performance comparison with competitors at 1080p

Comparable to RTX 4060 Ti 16GB, which is significantly more expensive.

Outperforms RX 7600 and RTX 4060 by nearly 15%.

Strong performance in Red Dead Redemption 2, thanks to Vulkan support improvements.

Mixed results in other games, but still competitive with price competitors.

Overall, a significant generational uplift in performance.

Competitive performance at 1440p, surpassing RX 6700 XT.

Surpasses expectations, exceeding the promised 10% lead over RTX 4060.

Strong performance in various games, including The Last of Us Part I and Returnal.

A good value card for both 1080p and 1440p gaming.

Requires motherboard with Resizable BAR support.

Significant performance hit with ray tracing, but still delivers solid 60+ FPS in some games with settings adjustments.

1440p ray tracing performance is limited, with most cards failing to reach 60 FPS.

Issues with Cyberpunk 2077's ultra ray tracing settings on CPUs with 3D VCache; Intel is working on a fix.

Game compatibility has improved significantly since launch.

XeSS 2 includes AI upscaling, frame generation, and latency reduction.

XeSS 2 is a solid upscaling technology, but Nvidia's DLSS offers better performance scaling.

Excellent frame generation performance in F1 2024, almost indistinguishable from native rendering.

Supports more codecs than Nvidia or AMD in AV1 encoding, but Nvidia's NVENC is faster.

Underperforms in Blender's optics rendering compared to last-gen cards.

Good AI performance, leading in Stable Diffusion but slightly behind in computer vision.

Effective cooling solution keeps thermals under control.

Higher TDP compared to competitors, but still uses only one PCIe 8-pin power connector.

Lower performance per watt compared to Nvidia.

Observed power spikes higher than advertised TDP.

Overall, a great budget GPU that is a worthy upgrade.

Future competition from AMD and Nvidia, and potential impact of tariffs.