Intel Claims Its ‘Battlemage’ GPU Beats Nvidia’s Midrange Cards at Just $250

Intel’s all-new Battlemage GPU lineup, including the budget-end Arc B580 and B570 graphics cards, is supposed to compete with other lower-mid-range GPUs from Nvidia and AMD. It’s also supposed to be close to 24% faster than the previous-gen A750 GPUs. Perhaps the most important aspect of the Intel cards is their memory, with 12 GB of memory on the top end compared to the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060’s 8 GB.

Otherwise, the company says the B580 will have 20 Xe2-cores (with similar graphics architecture to Intel’s Lunar Lake CPUs), five render slices, 20 ray tracing units, and a 2.67 GHz clock speed. It has a memory bandwidth of 456 GB/s and a 190W power draw. It uses the older PCIe 4.0 x8 connection, so any older-model PC owner won’t have to worry about moving to PCIe 5.0. The “Limited Edition” model presented by Intel also includes a single 8-pin power connection.

© Image: Intel

Intel stacked its latest discrete cards against the 4060 and AMD RX 7600, which came out in spring 2023. However, Intel’s shining grace is its performance for its price. Intel says the Arc B580 starts at $250. For that price, Intel says you’re better ray tracing performance compared to Team Red or Team Green’s mid-range offerings. Intel already has multiple OEMs on board to make its new Arc B-series, including ASRock, Gunnir, Maxsun, Onix, and Sparkle.

Intel’s in-game benchmarks tell an interesting story. Team Blue says you’ll get a 10% boost for in-game performance compared to the 4060. That could mean an average difference of about 15 frames in a game like Control or putting a game like Hogwarts Legacy and Cyberpunk 2077 above 60 FPS, beating the popular 4060. That doesn’t mean it wins every time. Intel’s benchmarks show the Nvidia card still won out in games like Gears of War 5 and Counter-Strike 2. That was in a PC configuration with an Intel Core i9-14900K CPU.

© Image: Intel

The A750 first launched for a little under $300, making the B850’s price point all that more enticing. That doesn’t mean it’s all gravy. We would have liked to see benchmarks comparing AMD’s offerings to Intels, but we will have to wait for reviews. The more-impressive B580 should be available starting Dec. 13, while the $220 B570 won’t be around until Jan. 16.

Intel Tries to Boost Game Performance with XeSS 2

The performance should be expanded with Intel’s AI upscaler XeSS 2, which now incorporates a super resolution rendering effect and frame generation. Like Nvidia’s DLSS Super Resolution, XeSS-SR essentially plays the game at a lower resolution, then upscales each frame to make it look like it displays at a higher resolution, boosting frame rates. Intel claimed super resolution can get you 70% better framerates on a game like Cyberpunk 2077 or around 38% better in Horizon Forbidden West. That’s all in XeSS’ Performance mode on a B580 at 1440p.

XeSS is currently supported in a little more than 150 games. That’s more than the number of supported games from last year, but it’s still potentially limited compared to the hundreds of games that specifically support AMD’s FSR 2 and FSR 3. Nvidia’s DLSS is integrated directly into both Unreal Engine and Unity, meaning it’s one of the most widely supported upscalers in the industry currently.

What Intel showed was very dependent upon XeSS. The benchmarks Intel claims it can provide for demanding games like Total War: Warhammer III and Ghost of Tsushima were squeaking up to 60 FPS but with XeSS in performance mode. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s also what we expect from the 4060, but we’d need hands-on with Battlemage in a modern machine before we can directly compare the new Arcs to its contemporaries.

Intel is comparing Battlemage to GPUs that arrived over a year and a half ago. What’s also interesting about the benchmarks is that Intel isn’t comparing itself to last year’s $400 RTX 4060 Ti, which was Nvidia’s more recent, more power-efficient version of the same GPU.

Based on leaks and rumors, Nvidia’s rumored 50-series GPUs seem more focused on the higher-end and ultimately be extremely expensive cards. We still haven’t seen anything official about the Blackwell GPUs, but rumored specs reported by Videocardz would put the 5060 and 5060 Ti’s release in March next year. We don’t know what kind of RAM it’s packing, but the 5070 is tipped to have 12 GB and a 192-bit memory bus compared to the 5080’s 16 GB. Memory isn’t everything, but it is a big factor in future-proofing.

You can currently find the 4060 for prices inching toward $200, and that will grow more stark once Team Green releases the 5060. However, I don’t think you should ignore Intel here. The memory you get for the price is significant, and it could mean gains for anybody putting together a mid-range tower. I would have liked to see Intel show off a less capable CPU than the 14900K for the sake of budget builders. Still, with more competition, perhaps we’ll see another age when folk can build a gaming-capable PC that costs less than $600.