The new king of $250 GPUs (for now)

When Intel introduced its the first Arc video cards two years agoI was more than skeptical. Can a company that famously abandoned its last major desktop GPU project in 2009 really make an impact on a market dominated by NVIDIA and AMD? Well, when I reviewed them in 2022, the Arc A750 and A770 were better than I thought, although they were also held back by poor Intel drivers. But it looks like Intel has learned from its mistakes.

New $250. Arc B580 performs better than AMD's low-end Radeon 7600, and may even be a bit of a mess with NVIDIA when it comes to budget ray tracing. The only question is whether it is worth investing in an Intel graphics card, given its price. challenging corporate prospects. But for such a cheap graphics card, whose price dates back to the early 2000s, the risk may be worth it.

Intel

The Intel Arc B580 is a rarity: a $250 GPU that delivers stable 1080p and 1440p gaming, even with a little ray tracing.

Pros

• Faster than Radeon 7600 and RTX 4060
• XeSS scaling works well
• Cool and quiet performance
• Only 250 dollars

Cons

• XeSS is not as widely supported as DLSS 3.
• New AMD cards could beat it

$250 at Newegg

The B580 marks the debut of second-generation Intel Arc Xe2 GPUs, and will be joined next month by the $219 B570. Based on their specs alone, it's easy to see why they're attractive for budget gaming. The B580 features 20 Xe cores, 20 ray tracing units, and a higher clock speed than previous Arc cards. But most importantly, it has 12GB of VRAM with a 192-bit memory interface, giving you more than enough space for 1440p gameplay.

By comparison, the $299 NVIDIA RTX 4060 has 8GB of VRAM and a much more limited 128-bit interface. Even the RTX 4060 Ti has such a meager amount of VRAM that it limits both of these GPUs to mostly 1080p gaming (especially if you need ray tracing). AMD Radeon RX 7600which costs about $269, also comes with 8GB of RAM and weaker ray tracing performance than NVIDIA and Intel cards.

Although Intel has a clear advantage in hardware, time is once again becoming a major issue. The Arc B580 was unveiled in preparation for CES 2025, where NVIDIA and AMD are expected to showcase new desktop GPUs. Given NVIDIA's ever-increasing prices, I wouldn't bet on the RTX 5060 costing around $250, but AMD is a different story. For years, the company has been trying to make an impact in the low- and mid-range GPU market. this is reportedly still the case with RDNA 4 cards. There's a good chance we'll eventually see some kind of low-cost next-gen GPU from AMD.

However, if you need to put together a budget gaming rig in the next few months or so, the Arc B580 will serve you well. In my testing, it scored slightly higher than the RTX 4060 Ti in the Timespy Extreme Benchmark 3DMark test, and was also noticeably faster than the Radeon 7600. The B580 shined even brighter with ray tracing. I achieved an average speed of 58 fps in Cyberpunk 2077 The test runs at 1080p resolution with Ultra graphics settings and medium ray tracing. On the other hand, the Radeon 7600 sometimes struggled to stay above 40fps at similar settings.

I was genuinely surprised by how well the Arc B580 handled 1440p gaming. IN Dragon Age: Veilgarde Guardian, I averaged 70fps with high graphics settings, medium ray tracing, and Intel XeSS scaling enabled. That's better performance than you'll see on a $700 PlayStation 5 Pro (though admittedly Sony's PSSR AI upscaling may seem better to you). I also average 85fps while gaming. Halo Infinite at 1440p with graphics maxed out, which was slightly better than the 4060 Ti. While we're used to budget cards being mostly limited to 1080p gaming, the Arc B580's extra memory clearly makes it well suited for 1440p gaming.

However, there are advantages that competition offers. NVIDIA RTX GPUs can also run specialized NVIDIA Broadcaster applications that clean up audio and video for streams and recordings. Additionally, NVIDIA DLSS 3 scaling is available in more than 500 games, and Intel XeSS technology just hacked 200. And then there's the driver issue: NVIDIA has years of experience creating reliable GPU software, while Intel is still recovering from recent driver bugs. At the very least, XeSS 2's AI scaling seems more useful than AMD's FSR 3 (FidelityFX Super Resolution), as Intel's technology looks significantly better and can often improve game performance by 30 percent or more.

The Arc B580 also survived several hours of testing and gaming without any hardware or driver issues. When I first tested the Arc A750 and A770, they often failed within an hour of testing. Intel software has clearly made some progress. The reference B580 model I tested also stayed relatively cool under load, never exceeding 64 degrees Celsius (which also prevented its two large fans from ever making much noise). While there will be third-party cards available, I'm also impressed by Intel's reference design: the B580 feels premium and durable rather than cheap and plasticky like many other budget GPUs.

At this point it appears that Intel already has problems keeping Arc B580 in stocka rare good problem for beleaguered chip giant. It's easy to see why gamers are excited: it delivers solid 1080p and 1440p performance for most new games, even with a little ray tracing. Finally, there's a viable $250 GPU that won't make you feel like you're desperately behind the pack. This is a clear victory for Intel – at least until we see new products from AMD.