I went sim racing with the Intel Arc B580 GPU — it proves you can get great PC gaming without breaking the bank

CES 2025 has been dominated by Nvidia, and the RTX 5090 easily provides the best gaming experience I’ve ever had. But with it comes that sky-high $1,999 price tag, and I wouldn’t judge you if you weren’t willing to donate a kidney to get that kind of cash.

So, what if you wanted a great gaming experience without breaking the bank? That’s where the Intel Arc B580 comes in. I got to test this $250 GPU made for 1440p gaming with a rather intense experiment — racing in F1 24 with a triple monitor setup.

And after tearing it up and annihilating the lap record around Las Vegas (I am Tom’s Guide’s resident sim racer, after all), I can safely say that this low-cost graphics card is a bit of a budget breakthrough. Let me explain.

What’s the setup?

So, to take you on a tour of the whole rig, that PC is packed with the Battlemage GPU (specifically the ASRock Steel Legend B580) that comes with 20 Compute units, 20 Ray Tracing cores and a whopping 160 AI cores to drive the frame generation I’ll tell you about soon.

Most importantly, the B580 is also home to 12GB of GDDR6 video memory. That’s the same amount that you’d find in the more expensive RTX 4070, and it’s a healthy amount for keeping a lot of game graphics instructions stored for quick reference.

You’ve also got the Intel Core Ultra 5 245K CPU, 48GB of DDR5 RAM and a Samsung 980 SSD — all patched onto an MSI Z890 motherboard with a 1,000-watt power supply. A quick trip to PC Part Picker to get all these (including that liquid cooler and a case) brings the price to just under $1,500 — a surprisingly low cost for a mid-tier gaming PC.

As for the monitors, you’ve got a triple QHD monitor setup for the full panoramic racing experience — paired with the Thrustmaster T-GT II racing wheel and T-LCM pedals.

Over 100 frames per second

As I was racing, I saw framerates peak at 120 FPS very consistently, dipping to the mid-100s in moments when speeding down the graphically intense Las Vegas Boulevard at over 200 MPH… Yea, on three monitors. How is Intel pulling this off?

Well, it comes down to its AI technologies running in the background of all those cores. Xe Super Sampling 2 is busy rendering a higher quality image at a lower resolution (when pixel peeping, I’m guessing around 1080p upscaled to that full 1440p).

Xe Frame Generation is Team Blue’s version of DLSS, and that combines with Xe Low Latency technologies to ensure that all those AI-generated frames don’t create a noticeable latency between your steering inputs and the game.

Can you notice these at work? Yes. The telltale sign is what’s called “ghosting.” As the AI predicts and paints in the next frame, it may leave a bit of a ghost trail of the frame before it, which, in a fast-moving game like F1 24, you can see happening in the surroundings you drive by.

While it's noticeable, it certainly wasn’t distracting while putting the card in the laps — a minor miracle when you think you’re getting this graphics card for less than $300!

Outlook

After witnessing what the RTX 5090 could do, I was a little apprehensive about checking out Team Blue’s tech. I’d heard all the praise from my mates in the industry for the B580 GPU, but I didn’t know what I was personally in for.

It turns out that apprehension was misplaced. Thanks to Intel’s AI trickery, cheap doesn’t have to mean compromised gaming performance anymore. When it comes to sim racing, you don’t have to feel bound to get an expensive graphics card to run it without any hitches.

And while, yes, you will always get a better experience if you put more money into it (and the wait for Intel’s Xess to come to more than 201 games continues), this is one of the PC gaming highlights in terms of price-to-performance.

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