Intel Arc B570 and B580 Graphics
Battlemage architecture has turned Intel Arc cards into solid mid-range alternatives to AMD and Nvidia
Intel’s Arc cards will take up two slots but have plenty of room for cooling
B570
SCORE
PRICE
£175 (£205 inc VAT)
from amazon.co.uk
B580
SCORE
PRICE
£200 (£240 inc VAT)
from amazon.co.uk
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vidia may have set the world of high-end graphics cards alight at CES 2025, but weeks earlier Intel had jumped its rivals by releasing two cards based on its Battlemage architecture. With much-improved drivers compared to the first round of Intel Arc GPUs, it’s now a genuine alternative to Nvidia and AMD if you have between £200 and £250 to spend. On paper, the B580 looks far less powerful than the existing A750, never mind the full-fat A770 16GB card. The B580 has “only” 20 Xe-cores, compared to 28 on the A750 and 32 on the A770; even the lowly A580 has 24 Xe-cores.
The real story is that Battlemage has major architectural design changes, which means that ray tracing sees a 1.5x to 2.1x improvement per Xe-core, for example. Mesh and vertex throughputs see improvements of 2x or more, as does sampler feedback. Another big change is the move to native SIMD16 instructions, compared to Alchemist’s SIMD32 units (SIMD16 stands for single instruction multiple data, 16-wide). Couple all these changes with the higher boost frequencies and the results you see in the graphs opposite are far less surprising.