Intel launches new Arc B580 GPU with 10% more performance than an RTX 4060 for $249 but the rumoured RTX 4070-beater is nowhere to be seen

pcgamer.com:

Do you want the good news or the bad news about Intel's new Arc B580 graphics card? OK, the main good news is that it exists at all. Intel's second-gen Battlemage graphics tech is official, it's announced, it's real and it's here.

Going by Intel's claims, the actual architecture looks pretty great, too. It's been updated to be more efficient, to deliver better utilisation and performance per graphics core and also sports improved ray tracing and AI performance. Indeed, pound-for-pound, it looks like Intel may now be able to match Nvidia for ray tracing performance.

But what about the bad news? Well, the new B580 and its B570 sibling are fairly low end cards. Nvidia is only aiming at marginally beating the Nvidia RTX 4060 for now. There is no B770 board with RTX 4070 or higher performance, at least not at this time.

To round off the key specs, the B580 is a 12 GB card with a 192-bit bus, which gives it a much more powerful memory subsystem than the RTX 4060. Is has more bandwidth than the RTX 4060 Ti, too. And only the 16 GB version of the 4060 Ti can match or beat the 580's VRAM.

It sports 20 of Intel's Xe cores and by our reckoning 2,560 shaders. That compares to 32 cores and 4,096 shaders of the existing top Intel GPU, the Arc A770. For the record, the Nvidia RTX 4060 rocks 3,072 shaders, though Intel's and Nvidia's architectures aren't directly comparable

There's also a cheaper B570 with slightly cut-down specs. Both cards are based on the same BMG-G21 GPU.

Overall, Intel is claiming that the B580 has the measure of the Nvidia RTX 4060 by 10% on average at 1440p while undercutting its $299 by $50. Intel is leaning into the memory advantage of its new cards for 1440p gaming in particular and with ray tracing enabled. After all, the RTX 4060 is a mere 8 GB card with a 128-bit memory bus.

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Intel claims, for instance, that while the B580 is slightly slower than an RTX