Intel’s Arc B580 graphics card impressed us a few months back, thanks to genuinely decent performance with plenty of VRAM at a mainstream price, but we never got around to reviewing the even cheaper B570 model – until now. That might not be such a bad thing though, as it’s meant that we could spend some real time using this GPU as it’s meant to be used, get an idea of availability and run some extra tests on the driver overhead issues identified by the tech press post-launch.
We’ll get into that stuff in a moment, but for now let’s answer a simple question: what separates this nominally $220 B570 card from the nominally $250 B580? The answer is not much – and that makes the B570 perhaps the more compelling of the two options.
Specifically, we’re looking at a drop from 20 Xe cores and RT units to 18, XMX AI engines go from 160 to 144 and core clocks drop by around six percent. The biggest change is to the memory subsystem, which moves from 12GB of GDDR6 on a 192-bit bus to 10GB on a 160-bit bus, so the B570 only has 83 percent of the bandwidth afforded to the full-fat B580. Power also drops significantly, from a rated 190W to just 150W on the B570.
Those power reductions feel nicely proportional to the cutbacks elsewhere, and testing supports that idea. Without spoiling the results on the following pages too much, the B570 achieves around 89 percent of the B580’s performance while drawing 88 percent of its power in games like Alan Wake 2, with a similar 87 percent of the performance for 88 percent of the power in Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2.
Of course, these results don’t exist in a vacuum, and it’s instructive to look at how the Arc cards compare to their nearest AMD and Nvidia equivalents when it comes to power efficiency. The Nvidia RTX 4060 beats the B580 in performance terms in Alan Wake 2, for example, while drawing 80 percent of the power. The AMD RX 7600, meanwhile, is the fastest option at 107 percent of the B580’s average frame-rate while consuming six percent more power to do so.
If we look at those Alan Wake 2 results in pure effiency terms, measured in joules per frame, the RTX 4060 is the outright leader at 3.19, followed by the other three cards grouped tightly together: AMD at 3.98, B580 at 4.03 and B570 at 4.06. That changes if we look at RT performance in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, where Nvidia is again in front at 2.2 joules per frame versus 2.94 and 3.00 joules for the B580 and B570; AMD trails at 4.29 and is therefore the least efficient by some margin.
| Arc B580 | Arc B570 | |
|---|---|---|
| Xe Cores | 20 | 18 |
| Render Slices | 5 | 5 |
| RT Units | 20 | 18 |
| XMX AI Engines | 160 | 144 |
| Graphics Clock | 2670MHz | 2500MHz |
| Memory | 12GB | 10GB |
| Memory Interface | 192-bit | 160-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 456GB/s | 380GB/s |
| Peak TOPs | 233 | 203 |
| Total Board Power | 190W | 150W |
Of course, power efficiency is just one element of a great graphics card, and it’s worth looking at our pure performance results in greater detail – as we will do over the following pages.
Before we begin, it’s worth underlining exactly the sort of system we’re using for the majority of our performance testing – which is our standard high-end GPU benchmarking rig. This is based around what is still the fastest gaming CPU, the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, to shift the burden to the graphics card as much as possible. We also have 32GB of Corsair DDR5-6000 CL30 memory, a high-end Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard and a 1000W Corsair PSU.
We will also be looking at performance on more realistically matched components – specifically lower-end CPUs that take a greater performance hit from Intel’s notably higher driver overhead – which follows on page eight.
With all that said, let’s get into the pure performance benchmarks to start off.
Intel Arc B570 Analysis
- Introduction [This Page]
- RT benchmarks: Alan Wake 2, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
- RT benchmarks: Dying Light 2, F1 24, Hitman: World of Assassination
- RT benchmarks: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, A Plague Tale: Requiem [This Page]
- Game benchmarks: Alan Wake 2, Black Myth: Wukong
- Game benchmarks: F1 24, Forza Horizon 5, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2
- Game benchmarks: Hitman: World of Assassination, A Plague Tale: Requiem
- Driver overhead testing: does Arc underperform with older CPUs?
- Conclusions, value and recommendations
