I played games for 100 hours on Intel Arc B580 — it proved to me that GPUs are Intel's way back from the brink

Tom's Guide

4 days ago

Intel's in a tough spot. I don't need to sit here and wax lyrical about the perfect storm Team Blue finds itself in amongst rivals moving ahead in CPU and AI chip dominance — you can see it for yourself in the financial results and redundancies.
But there's one jewel in the crown that I believe could be the company's way back: budget GPUs. The $249 Intel Arc B580 is easily the best low-cost card I've tested, and it puts Nvidia and AMD on notice for their compromised low-cost options.
For gaming, it's simply splendid at 1080p and 1440p — offering strong performance with a spacious 12GB of video memory (VRAM) and a higher memory bandwidth than the RTX 5060 Ti for loading larger textures and graphical details at a far faster pace and virtually eliminate any chance of that frame rate getting all wobbly in the process. And bear in mind that you're getting this for $130 less than Nvidia's mid-range GPU with 8GB of VRAM!
There are a couple of small sore spots we do have to address. Firstly, ray tracing is not its strong suit, and with some games now making RT required, you'll need to tone down those other textures to compensate. Luckily, you can just turn this off in the vast majority of PC titles, so it's not that big of a deal.
And second, if you are using your gaming tower for anything other than gaming, be prepared for slower performance in AI and professional work. Don't get me wrong, it'll still chew through it, but Nvidia's CUDA cores steam ahead here.
That being said though, there is absolutely nothing at this price tag that can compete in the gaming space. It is a budget champ and after 100 hours of playing, I believe this is an area where Intel can really thrive — the company knows it too given the onward march of driver updates gradually improving performance and its own AI trickery (XeSS).
Intel Arc B580
Price
$249 / £249
Video memory
12GB GDDR6
Texture Mapping Units (TMUs)
160
Render Output Units (ROPs)
80
Clock speed
2,670 MHz
Power consumption (TDP)
190W
Ports
1x HDMI 2.1, 3x DisplayPort 1.4a
So long as you're savvy about playing in the confines of what this budget GPU can do, you're going to have a whole lot of fun with any AAA title you throw at it.
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Let me tear the bandaid off real quick and say you shouldn't try 4K with this. In the words of a friendly ski instructor in South Park: 'you're going to have a bad time.' That being said, though, you're reading this because you're on the hunt for a cheap GPU — meaning you already know that 1080p and maybe 1440p is your target.
Well, wait until you get a load of this.
GPU
Cyberpunk 2077 ray tracing ultra 1440p
Forza Horizon 5 max settings 1440p
Call of Duty max settings 1440p
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti (16GB)
17.86 FPS
94 FPS
80 FPS
Intel Arc B580
10.06 FPS
79 FPS
72 FPS
So far, mixed numbers, right? Comparing numbers I captured from the more premium RTX 5060 Ti 16GB can be a bit 'apples and oranges,' and with these tests coming with a healthy dose of ray tracing, you start to see a weakness (more on that later).
That's why it's critical to go into your settings and turn off ray tracing. I know some people love that additional shiny lighting and reflection detail, but honestly, after sinking many hours into the B580, it's rare that you miss it. Especially when you get numbers like this from a $249 graphics card.
Game
Optimal settings
Frame rate (FPS)
Cyberpunk 2077
1440p Ultra no ray tracing / XeSS frame gen
90.12 FPS
Black Myth: Wukong
1440p Medium no ray tracing / XeSS
77 FPS
Forza Horizon 5
1440p Ultra no ray tracing / XeSS
106 FPS
Alan Wake 2
1440p high no ray tracing
45 FPS
And with baked in lighting on the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 and Forza Horizon 5, they're still gorgeous games. The B580 absolutely eats them up with the greatest of ease.
In a world where companies are charging $50 more for cards packing far less video memory and far lower power, it almost feels like a breath of fresh air to just get a great gaming graphics card at a reasonable price.
For context, I've pulled some average numbers for Nvidia's RTX 5060 from 3DMark's benchmark database to compare. While you can see the 5060 does indeed pull slightly ahead, it's nowhere near to warrant paying more for less VRAM.
And yes, there is DLSS trickery and multi-frame gen that will make this pop out ahead in frame rate. But this all works provided you play in Nvidia's playground. Beyond that, you need more memory to load the increasingly complex textures, and Intel gives you that for a nice touch of future-proofing.
'$249? What's the catch?' I hear you ask. Well, honestly for gaming, not really much. There's a small hitch, but the real catch comes when I try to do work with it.
This is more of a PSA for now, given the majority of games give you the option to turn it off. Ray tracing is not the B580's strong suit, as you could clearly see from the comparison numbers above.
Once you turn it off, then you start to lean less on the weaker RT cores in here, and more upon that quick clock speed, those TMUs and the impressive amount of video memory.
But with games like Indiana Jones and The Great Circle needing ray tracing as a minimum, this could be a glimpse of how spec requirements will change in the future — possibly proving problematic for certain games over the next few years.
Luckily, I don't use my gaming tower for productivity. But if you do, this isn't the strongest when it comes to GPU-intensive workloads like creative work and AI.
GPU
Blender benchmark Median (higher is better)
Procyon AI image gen Stable Diffusion XL (higher is better)
Intel Arc B580
2201
1186
Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060
3703
1317
With other lower-cost GPUs coming in with faster performance in animation, complex 4K video edits and RAW photo neural filters, this is good for gaming but not for work.
And that lands the Intel Arc B580 in interesting territory — ditching what it believes is unnecessary and focusing solely on playing games well for a cheap price. For that, this GPU absolutely delivers.
With nice headroom in the VRAM department, strong performance across all AAA titles (provided you turn ray tracing off), and that impressively low price tag, for PC gamers on a budget, I'm struggling to really identify any deal-breaking complaints.
Affordable graphics cards could be Intel's redemption arc, and I hope Intel keeps pushing hard on this to be a budget leader. Because based on the B580, it's absolutely deserved.