Intel Arc B580 review

The model that landed in the Stuff labs was Intel’s own Limited Edition, a gorgeous slab of minimalist tech that won’t be for sale. Think stealth bomber, not souped-up boy racer. It’s all matte black and clean lines, a sophisticated look that we wish more card makers would adopt. You, however, will be buying versions from partners like ASRock, who are thankfully bringing them to India.

Under the bonnet, the B580 is built on the new Xe2 architecture and TSMC's 5nm process. The headline spec that’ll make your eyebrows do a little dance is the whopping 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM on a 192-bit bus. That’s more memory than its main rival, the Nvidia RTX 5060, which feels a bit stingy with its 8GB. This immediately positions the B580 as a more future-proof option for gamers worried about VRAM demands in the latest titles.

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Right, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty: the frames. In the right conditions, the Arc B580 is an absolute giant-killer. At a 1440p resolution, it frequently matches or even outperforms the pricier RTX 5060. Our testing showed some properly impressive results. The gorgeous Stellar Blade ran better here than on AMD’s RX 9060 XT (16GB), hitting a smooth 70fps at 1440p high settings, leaving the AMD card in the dust at 55fps. Battlefield 6 was another shocker, managing a stable 110fps average at 1440p and even a playable 60fps at 4K. Bonkers.

But (and it’s a but you could park a bus in), the B580 is still a second-generation GPU from Intel, and you’ll see in the further game tests that there are some instances where the GPU doesn’t really perform half as good as the much more expensive AMD and Nvidia. So it’s not like you plonk this in your budget rig and the GPU will magically outperform every other GPU in the price range in every game. In some games, it has a good lead, and in some, it stays behind. The 4K and 1440p performance in comparison to Nvidia and AMD 8GB cards is better simply because of the 12GB VRAM headroom on the Intel, but at 1080p, things start to get even.

Mafia: The Old Country was barely playable at 1440p, stuttering its way to 30fps. We also saw some oddities with Intel’s XeSS upscaling and Frame Generation. In both Cyberpunk 2077 and Black Myth Wukong, enabling Frame Generation offered zero performance uplift, with frames even dipping slightly in Wukong. It suggests the software side of the equation isn't quite as polished as the hardware. This isn't the seamless 'plug-and-play' experience you get from the competition. 

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Going back to Black Myth Wukong, we got around 20FPS on Cinematic Graphics at 1440p with Super Resolution set to 100% and Xess and RT turned off. Performance barely improved to 26FPS after reducing Super Resolution to 75% and then further reducing the resolution to 1080p got us 27 FPS. Only after reducing the graphics quality to High (which is lower than Very High) did we get around 51FPS. This is where the AMD RX 9060 XT (16GB) feels like a more expensive yet stable option if you’re looking for 1440p gaming with upscaling. It’s not a fair comparison, but it does give a perspective on what you can get for a few extra grand.

Again, weirdly, in Cyberpunk 2077, there was no frame rate uplift with Frame Generation enabled on Intel. Although Cyberpunk is one of the few titles where Intel performs much better at 75FPS average at high settings at 1440p and Xess upscaling set to Ultra Quality.

It’s abundantly clear that this card is for 1080p gaming and sometimes 1440p games for games that Intel has proper driver support. Doom: The Dark Ages at 1080p with Xess upscaling on Native resolution and Ultra Nightmare graphic preset, we got 60 FPS average. I see that FPS can go higher in low demon density areas, but can hit around 55 FPS in high density areas, which will often be the case, considering the game is about killing hordes of demons. We switched to 1440p resolution and got 40 FPS average, which drops to 35 or 31 average in crowded sections.

Path Tracing in Cyberpunk and Doom is better kept off because the performance plummets. In Doom, with Path Tracing enabled, the menu itself starts lagging. It happened with AMD as well.

The Intel Arc B580 is one of the most exciting Intel products we’ve tested in ages. It is a genuine triumph of engineering progress for Intel, injecting some much-needed competition into the budget GPU market. On paper, and in the right system, its price-to-performance is simply phenomenal.

So, who is it for? If you are building a brand-new gaming PC on a tight budget and pairing this card with a modern, mid-range CPU (think AMD Ryzen 9000 or Intel 13th or 14th-gen), then the B580 is a spectacular choice. For around ₹28,890, you’re getting a card that chews through 1080p games, offers a generous 12GB of VRAM for the future, and even has thermal efficiency. 

However, if you’re looking to drop a new GPU into your existing, slightly older PC, we have to tell you that some reviewers suggest the GPU might have a CPU overhead issue, which means you will almost certainly be leaving a massive amount of performance on the table. We haven’t really tested this with our older CPUs, but we will update this review in the future as we test more games across different builds.