Intel has finally announced the Intel Arc B580 and B570 next-generation graphics cards. Built on its 'Battlemage' architecture, they are both budget-friendly GPUs aimed at making PC gaming just a bit more accessible.
The Intel Arc B580 and B570 follow in the footsteps of the A770 and A750, which were both aimed at 1080p gaming, with some light ray tracing thrown in for good measure. With these next-generation cards, Intel has introduced a new architecture, along with new XMX AI cores that should make the next iteration of XeSS (Xe Super Sampling) much more competitive with Nvidia's DLSS and Sony's PSSR.
The Intel Arc B580 features 20 Xe-Cores across 5 compute units, or as Intel calls them 'Render Slices'. Each Xe-Core features 8 Vector Engines, Intel's shader core, and 8 XMX AI cores. That means the Arc B580 has both 160 shader cores, and 160 AI accelerators. This is coupled with 12GB of GDDR6 memory, which is high for a $249 GPU.
As for the Arc B570, it has 18 Xe-Cores, for a total of 144 Vector Engines and AI accelerators. That's paired with 10GB of VRAM, which is still more than the 8GB offered by the $299 Nvidia RTX 4060.
Intel is claiming these new graphics cards are significantly more powerful than their last-generation counterparts, with the B870 being up to 80% faster than the A750 in some games. With that greater performance, Intel is also targeting 1440p gamers, which demands a more powerful graphics card than a 1080p gaming monitor would. However, we won't know how these new graphics cards actually perform until I get them in the lab for in-depth testing, so stay tuned on that front.
Both of these Battlemage graphics cards will be out soon, with the B580 launching on December 13 for $249, and the Arc B570 launching on January 16th, starting at $219.
Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
