Budget gaming PCs get massive lifeline as Intel Arc B580 reviews show up Nvidia

The day has arrived, and reviews for the first desktop Battlemage graphics card, the Intel Arc B580 have begun to drop. There’s a common trend throughout all the reviews we’ve seen, and it appears Intel has struck gold with an incredible sub-$250 option.

Intel’s Alchemist cards were not met with the best reception. While they came into their own after a few updates, they haven’t made our best graphics card list for a reason. Now as Nvidia and AMD’s aims and audience have evolved, a massive gap for a low-priced competitor was sorely needed, and Intel has picked up the gauntlet.

Leaks and early benchmarks had pitted the B580 against Nvidia’s budget cards the RTX 4060 and AMD’s RX 7600. The story was that it could stand toe-to-toe with them, and we’ve gotten our confirmation.

In a Linus Tech Tips review, while playing Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p, at Ultra settings (with no help from XeSS), the B580 stood tall with 95fps on average. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD Radeon RX 7600, meanwhile, both slunk down to 78fps and 82fps in the same tests.

Gamers Nexus also gave it a thorough testing, with the channel’s 4K benchmarks for Final Fantasy XIV showing its prowess. The B580 not only bested the 4060 (average 36.7fps) and AMD 7600 (31.5fps), but it also managed to beat the 4060 Ti.

Intel’s card managed 47.2fps, which beats the more powerful Ti model by 6fps points at 41.2fps. Over the previous generation, it appears the B580 is also trouncing the last generation Intel flagship, which we tested for our Intel Arc A770 review.

What appears to be the major separation between Intel’s GPU and the competition is the correct choice of VRAM. The meager 8GB of VRAM on both the RX 7600 and RTX 4060 has been criticized as a bottleneck for modern games, particularly when you play at 2,560 x 1,440. While it was a budget option, the RTX 3060 comparatively provided 12GB of VRAM, bizarrely giving it a bit more future-proofing than its successor.

Now, it appears that Intel is slowly slipping into that spot as both competing companies are rumored to be remaining adamant about using 8GB on their budget cards. That’s despite newer games, such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, actually throwing up issues with cards that have less than 12GB of VRAM.

Scores and opinions have ranged from decent to excitable over the prospect of a new, worthy budget GPU. With a sector of the market that’s been neglected for years, it seems that some semblance of normality is returning to the space, where some of the best gaming PC designs have much more affordable prices.