Intel Arc B580 Battlemage Basics

Believable Benchmarks Or PR BS?

Yesterday a few sites got a peek at the new Battlemage GPUs from Intel, no reviews yet but it is a chance to see the cards and for Intel to share their internal benchmarking results.  The Arc B580 and Arc B570 are aimed at decent performance at 1440p with Ray Tracing support, for a very reasonable price.  The cards are both based off the BMG-G21 architecture produced on TSMC’s 5nm EUV process node and are referred to as Xe2 cards, they will also introduce XeSS 2.  The Intel reference design of the B580 uses a single 8-pin power connector, which will be true for the B570 as well.  However the B570 will be made by OEMs like Asus, ASRock, and others so we won’t see a reference design of that card and it is possible that Intel’s partners may up the power on their designs.

The B580 sports 12GB of RAM and an MSRP of $249, while $219 should buy you a B570 with an odd 10GB of RAM in total; not many 10GB cards out there but it is a bigger number than the 8GB which you would get from AMD or NVIDIA’s low end cards.  Those cads are significantly more expensive than Intel’s stated prices.  The slides at Ars Technica show Intel boasts 10% better performance than NVIDIA’s RTX 4060 and 24% faster than the original Arc A570.  On the AMD side, Intel contrasted it against the RX 7600 and again the Arc B580 beats the competition especially when Ray Tracing is enabled.  Please keep in mind these are internal benchmark results, so real world results may vary.

At TechPowerUp you can see the entire slide deck from Intel and pictures of the actual card.