$250 To Play Is Not Unreasonable
It hurts to drop $1000 on a GPU, even more so up here in Canada where the price is almost doubled. What once was a price tier reserved for Titan GPUs that hardly anyone bought has now become what you have to pay for a high end card. The pricing, well deserved or not, puts high end GPUs out of the reach of many, meanwhile the mid-range has languished somewhat. NVIDIA’s RTX 4060 sits around $300, as does AMD’s RX 7600XT. The somewhat less powerful RX 7600 goes for just over $250, making it affordable if not particularly powerful.
Intel’s B580 Battlemage offers 12GB of memory on a 192-bit memory bus and sucks down a mere 120-130W under load. It’s performance meets or beats the competition, though to be fair that competition is more than a year old, making it a great choice for 1080p or even 1440p gaming. If the B580 is anything like it’s predecessor the performance will continue to increase as new drivers arrive.
That leads us to the bad news. That $250 MSRP is a dream, the B580 sells for between $370-$400 at the moment, which destroys the price to performance benefit it would offer at MSRP. If you find yourself wanting to know more about the performance of the B580 in a specific game, for when the price comes down, you can check out Ars Technica as well as the links below.
As a competitor to the RTX 4060, the Arc B580 is actually pretty appealing, whether you're talking about 1080p or 1440p, in games with ray-tracing on or off. Even older DirectX 11 titles in our suite, like Grand Theft Auto V and Assassin's Creed Odyssey, don't seem to take the same performance hit as they did on older Arc cards.
The $250 is not a dream. Many people have been able to purchase one at that price. Those who hesitated will obviously have to wait as stocks are replenished.
Don’t be late.
Good on Intel for offering this level of performance had a decent price. If only AMD and Nvidia would get a clue.