Intel Arc B580 review

pcgamer.com:

I dread to think how bad things would have been had Intel released this Arc B580 graphics card back in the summer. All year long we've been expecting the new Battlemage GPU architecture to arrive in a new suite of discrete Intel graphics cards, but we've had to wait until the very last minute of 2024 for the company to be able to legitimately say it hit its target of a launch this year.

And where the previous generation Alchemist GPUs were notoriously unreliable in their levels of gaming performance, we were given to believe such things wouldn't be an issue with Battlemage. Indeed, from looking at the Xe2 GPU's first outing inside Lunar Lake, things did look pretty positive.

In its first discrete graphics card of this Battlemage generation—strangely the card whose Alchemist equivalent launched last—the $250 Arc B580 is offering a hefty 12 GB frame buffer, with a healthy 192-bit bus, and a re-designed graphics core aimed at being both more familiar to game engines and to deliver on the twin modern demands of AI and ray tracing workloads. Good job, considering it's launching at a higher price than the $190 A580 did.

Intel is also offering up XeSS-FG. This is its own take on Frame Generation, the interpolation technique introduced by Nvidia to magic up game frames seemingly from nowhere. And in principle it's far more like Nvidia's take on it than AMD's, using a single-model AI technique to achieve its own effects.

There's more cache, more memory, improved core components, and the promise of solid, reliable drivers. All very positive. That positivity, however, has largely evaporated upon first contact with the Arc B580, its BMG-G21 GPU, and the PC Gamer graphics card test gauntlet.

It's not all bad, not by a long shot, but given the state of the review drivers right now, I don't want to imagine what this launch would have looked like just a few months ago.

✅ You're willing to wait: There may well come a time soon where these driver inconsistencies are toast, and down