Just as Thanksgiving approaches, Intel’s highly anticipated Arc Battlemage graphics card series is poised to make a swift entry onto the market, beating the holiday rush. Ahead of its official debut, several online leaks have prematurely revealed aspects of the Intel Arc B580’s performance capabilities.
With the launch of Intel’s brand-new GPUs, the company is poised to challenge industry leaders AMD and Nvidia in the coming year, despite not initially vying for top spots on our graphics card rankings, as aggressive pricing with the Battlemage series threatens to shake up the market ahead of their new card launches early next year? If these upgrades prove as impactful as the latest rumors suggest, they could represent attractive value propositions for gamers on a budget, making them perfect additions to one’s summer gaming arsenal.
According to reliable sources, including the perennially accurate Geekbench benchmarking platform, the info originates from there. As a result of this extensive benchmarking exercise’s widespread dissemination, the outcomes can be added to the online database, often becoming one of the earliest sources of leaked benchmarks when testers with early access to hardware inadvertently or intentionally upload their results following a test run.
The Geekbench run appears to confirm this event, with a software analysis showing a GPU detected as the Intel Arc B580, listing the 12GB of VRAM specified in the B580’s specs, and identifying the presence of 160 vector engines, which Intel refers to as compute units.
According to the Geekbench leak, performance evaluations demonstrated the GPU’s efficiency in processing OpenCL and Vulkan tasks.
The benchmarking results provide an immediately comparable outcome for various GPUs on this assessment, but may not necessarily reflect their final gaming performance.
This examination of OpenCL takes a different approach, focusing on the computing prowess of the GPU rather than gaming performance, to evaluate its effectiveness in a broader range of numerically intensive tasks beyond gaming. Notwithstanding the comparison, it is evident that the B580 surpasses its Intel counterpart, the A580, by a margin of 9%, achieving a rating of 98,343 compared to the latter’s score of 89,928 in the same benchmark test.
While this ending may seem disappointing, further driver updates for the latest graphics card could potentially yield more impressive results. Which assessment is the least associated with gaming efficiency? As a more comprehensive alternative, the Vulkan we examine is indeed a superior choice, given its reputation as a robust and high-performance gaming API. The B580’s score of 103,445 factors outperforms the A580’s tally of 79,341 by a notable 30%, marking a significant improvement.
Compared to competing merchandise from AMD and Nvidia, these numbers position the B580 ahead of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and the AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT in the Vulkan test, although the RTX 4060 outperforms the B580 in the OpenCL test. Earlier rumors aligning with leaked specifications suggest the GPU’s projected performance capabilities are consistent with initial whispers.
Given its value when paired with what’s expected, this card might reasonably offer a very affordable financial option at this price. Given the 8GB RX 7600’s MSRP of $269 and the RXT 4060’s MSRP of $299, it is likely that the $249 price tag for the B580 represents a very aggressive move in terms of gaming performance, assuming its Vulkan Geekbench scores match expectations. The outcome of our situation will become clear in just a few days, so let’s exercise caution when assessing the implications of the new developments that are expected to unfold following their release on December 13.
As the clock ticks towards CES 2025 in January, anticipation is building for what AMD and Nvidia will unveil in response to each other’s technological advancements. Predicted to set the price bar for Nvidia, the forthcoming RTX 5090 will likely shape the company’s future pricing strategy, while AMD’s flagship RX 8800 XT is expected to dominate the top-tier gaming GPU landscape for the next 12 months.
