Once more, gamers searching for powerful video cards under $250 may find Intel’s second-generation Xe2 Arc GPUs to be attractive choices. Intel today revealed the $249 Arc B580 and the marginally less powerful $219 B570, both of which aim for 1,440p gaming, confirming rumors from the previous week. They have the company’s new XeSS2 AI features, such as frame creation, low latency modes, and Super Resolution upscaling (like the original XeSS), which will also be available on the earlier Arc cards. According to Intel, the objective is to outperform AMD’s Radeon 7600 and NVIDIA’s $299 RTX 4060 in terms of performance per dollar.
However, the Xe2 cards’ power boost could make things different for Intel. According to the firm, the B580 has a 10 percent advantage over NVIDIA’s RTX 4060 and is, on average, 24% faster than its previous A750 Limited Edition GPU at 1,440p with extreme graphics settings.
In terms of specifications, Intel’s latest GPUs ought to meet the needs of gamers that prioritize 1,440p. The B580 has a clock speed of 2,670 MHz, 20 Xe cores, 20 ray tracing units, and 12GB of VRAM. With 18 Xe cores, 10GB of RAM, and a clock speed of 2,500MHz, the B570 has slightly less power overall. Although 1080p gamers might not feel the need for much more power, I’d bet that most folks would be better off spending the extra $30 for a little more future-proofing.
During a media event, Intel Fellow Tom Petersen clarified that the business gained valuable insights from its earlier GPUs. “With XE2, we have a new hardware platform, and that allows us to deliver higher utilization, improved work distribution, and less software overhead,” he stated. “So at the end of the day, it’s all about getting software efficiency up so that we can deliver the benefits of the hardware we’re building.”
At the very least, NVIDIA’s DLSS3 and Intel’s new XeSS AI features are comparable. According to Intel, the B580 GPU can quadruple Diablo IV’s performance when utilizing XeSS, and the new frame generation capability should be able to increase your frame rate even further. Similar to NVIDIA’s technology, it interpolates whole new frames in addition to upscaling graphics from a lower resolution. Additionally, responsiveness is increased by 45% with the company’s XeSS2 low latency, or XeLL. According to Intel, the B580 outperforms the RTX 4060 in AI LLM performance, obtaining about 20 more tokens per second in workloads for Llama 2 and Llama 3.1.
Although it would be interesting to see whether Intel can ever expand its Arc GPU lineup beyond the mid-range (the Arc 770 was a strong rival to the RTX 3070 Ti). Over the past ten years, the concept of inexpensive and powerful video cards has all but vanished due to the increasing complexity of high-end GPUs. If Intel continues its GPU efforts, it may be able to attract a devoted following of low-cost gamers.
It won’t take long for you to obtain these latest GPUs if they pique your interest. Next month, on January 16, Arc B570 models will be available for $219, while Arc B580 cards will be available on December 13 for $249. The Arc B580 (above) will be produced by Intel in its own Limited Edition, but the B570 cards will be left to its partners, Acer, ASRock, and Sparkle.
