In case you missed it, Intel launched its brand-new range of discrete graphics cards known as Battlemage (or the B-Series). Two new GPUs have been announced so far: the Arc B580 and Arc B570. The former will be officially released on December 13th, but there are posts floating around online with people showing off their B580 card arriving early. The B570 isn’t due until January 16th.
Based on what we know so far and Intel’s official benchmarks, the B580 is already looking like one of the best-value GPUs at the moment. It “wins in value” compared to the likes of the RTX 4060 and is slated to deliver performance on par with AMD’s RX 6700 XT, also featuring 12GB VRAM.
Intel Arc B580 may have been mistook for A580 by some retailers
There have been several cases of users posting to forums such as Reddit with early photos of the B580. It’s worth noting that Intel is yet to release its initial batch of drivers to support the Battlemage GPU. F1 24 already has confirmed support for Intel’s new XeSS 2 upscaling tech, including Low Latency and Frame Generation, but is waiting for an “upcoming driver update” to be rolled out.
The cause of customers getting their B580 hasn’t been completely confirmed. However, Videocardz reports (based on “off the record” conversations with two retailers) that the new B580 GPUs may have been mislabeled as the last-gen A580. There’s also a chance that staff members responsible for shipping failed to notice the ‘B’ prefix.
In any case, with just a couple of days to the card’s official release, we’ll soon get to see how well the B580 performs in day-one benchmarks. Intel’s official stats claim “25% better performance per dollar” than close competition – namely the RTX 4060 and RX 7600.
