Intel’s next — and possibly last — desktop graphics cards will begin arriving in just 10 days. Right on cue, the company has announced the budget $249 Arc B580 and $219 Arc B570, shipping December 13th and January 16th, respectively, as the “best-in-class performance per dollar” options in the GPU market.
They’re based on the same Xe2 “Battlemage” GPU architecture you’ll find in Intel’s Lunar Lake laptop chips but with more than double the graphics cores, up to 12GB of dedicated video memory, and up to 190W of power compared to their limited laptop forms — enough power to see the B580 slightly beat Nvidia’s $299 RTX 4060 and AMD’s $269 RX 7600, according to Intel’s benchmarks, but sometimes still trading blows.
For example, Intel claims the B580 runs 10 percent faster on average than the RTX 4060 in a wide array of games at 1440p and ultra settings, assuming you pair both with Intel’s pricey Core i9-14900K CPU. There, Intel says that combo can break a 60fps average in Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, Returnal, and The Witcher 3 where the 4060 can’t.
Image: Intel
And yet the Nvidia card is still ahead in S…