Intel’s had some rather stormy news as of late, but its new second-gen “Battlemage” Arc B500-series discrete graphics cards are a ray of sunshine for anyone who’s been holding out for more affordable GPUs. If you want to dive deep into the Arc B580 “Battlemage”, then you need to tune into today’s episode of The Full Nerd podcast, where Intel’s Tom Petersen will be answering all at least some of our burning questions. We’ll be live around 1:30pm ET/10:30am PT.
The Arc B580 was leaked a little early, and already reason to be excited if you love a good budget card. The $249 card will come out in less than two weeks, packing 12GB of video memory and a 192-bit memory bus, beating Nvidia’s RTX 4060 ($300 retail price) and AMD’s RX 7600 ($270) budget offerings. Other highlights include 20 upgraded Xe cores, 20 ray tracing units, and a core clock topping out a 2.67GHz.
Update: Here’s the full video if you missed it. And if you’re short on time, Mark Hachman wrote up the bullet points in this article, covering a lot of the teething troubles with the initial Arc Alchemist release.
According to Intel’s promotional benchmarks, the Arc B580 should beat out the higher-tier Arc A750 from late 2022 by a handy 25 percent, despite costing $80 less. And that’s not even mentioning extra goodies like the XeSS2 super-sampling tech (Intel’s version of DLSS) and XeLL to reduce latency. Intel will follow up with an even cheaper B570 model going for $219 in January.
Intel Fellow Tom Petersen is a frequent guest of The Full Nerd, both in our studio and at trade shows like CES, and he knows his stuff. We can’t wait to pick his brain about these compelling new offerings for the budget PC gamer.
Again, the podcast will start at 1:30pc Eastern US time, 10:30am Pacific, on YouTube. (By the way, you should subscribe to The Full Nerd’s dedicated channel if you haven’t already!) Don’t worry, a recording will be available after if you have one of those pesky “job” things I keep hearing about.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he's the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop "battlestation" in his off hours. Michael's previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he's covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he's always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.