Intel ARC B580 In Pakistan | What To Expect?
Intel with the launch of Battlemage GPUs has entered the market of GPUs. With the introduction of the Arc B580 graphics card, Intel is aiming to compete with the likes of giants like NVIDIA and AMD. By offering high performance, advanced feature sets, and on top of that, competitive pricing is what makes the Intel B580 unique. We will explore the B580 GPU in detail in this article including its performance, pricing and specifications.
Specification
Intel Arc B580 GPU is built on the company’s latest generation Arc 5, code named Battlemage. Specifications are as follows:
| GPU Name | BMG-G21 |
| Architecture | Xe2 (5nm) |
| Bus Interface | PCIe 4.0 x8 |
| Memory | 12GB GDDR6 |
| Memory Bus | 192 Bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 456.0 GB/s |
| Graphics Clock | 2670 |
| Memory Clock | 2375 MHz |
| Shading Units | 2560 |
| RT Cores | 20 |
| Tensor Cores | 160 |
| TDP | 190 W |
Pricing
Arc B580 was launched on December 12th, 2024 with a price tag of USD 250$. But as the demand went high, pricing is not normal as of yet. GPU is being sold currently at around a mark of 300-340$ on NewEgg etc. But it is highly likely that the prices will drop down a little bit as soon as the demand bubble has burst.
GPU prices in Pakistan are always a little different from those in the USA. The reason is hefty import taxes and other regulation issues. Price of Intel ARC B580 in Pakistan will be initially around PKR 100,000/- and will most probably fall to somewhere around PKR 85,000/- in some time. Buy Intel Arc B580 in Pakistan at best price from TechMatched.
Gaming Performance
Graphics cards have historically been mostly anticipated by gamers as they are one of the biggest buyers of these pieces of technology. Intel Arc B580 with it’s 12GB of VRAM provides exceptionally good performance.
The 12GB of VRAM is more than good enough for 1080P gaming and can even get you through the entry level 1440P gaming. Arc B580 competes with RX 6700XT and RTX 4060TI while pulling ahead of RTX 4060 and RX 7600.
On average Intel ARC B580 surpasses RTX 4060 by almost 11% and AMD RX 7600 by 13% while coming very close to RTX 4060TI 16GB and RX 6700XT 12GB. As shown in the graph below the average FPS in raw rasterization is much better to its price competitors! The graph is a courtesy of Linus Media Group.
Ray Tracing
Arc B580 also features 20 ray-tracing cores which help it compete with NVIDIA in ray-traced gaming performance but it’s not as great as it is in raw raster performance. With Ray Tracing enabled in most games, the B580 performs very similarly to RTX 4060. RTX 4060TI leads the game with Ray Tracing enabled followed by RTX 4060. AMD GPUs lack a lot in RT performance.
Productivity
While many do care about gaming performance, not everyone looks for it everytime. There are people or should I say professionals who need GPU for their rendering etc related work.
Most commonly architects, game developers, video editors and graphic designers are the ones needing GPUs very frequently. Intel ARC B580 falls a little short in handbrake encoding against NVIDIA but it’s not by a big margin. Only 2-3% of the difference.
Blender is something where NVIDIA excels because of its Optix technology. Blender favors NVIDIA a lot, B580 loses by almost double the margin. B580 not only loses to AMD and NVIDIA but surprisingly as seen in the graph it’s significantly worse than the last gen Intel Arc GPUs. Intel says it’s because of lesser Xe cores than last gen GPUs.
AI Performance
The Intel Arc B580 proves to be impressive in AI performance, making it one of the strongest contenders in the current GPU market. With Intel’s second-generation Xe2 architecture powering the B580, it excels in tasks related to AI thanks to those 160 tensor cores.
B580 outperforms its competitors like NVIDIA’s RTX 4060 and AMD’s RX 7600 XT in Stable Diffusion and AI Vision tests and other image generation tasks. The enhanced architecture and mostly the optimizations done to the drivers since Intel’s last-gen GPUs have played a significant role in the performance of Arc B580 in AI-related workloads.
Intel’s XeSS 2 technology further enhances the B580’s AI capabilities. This technology uses AI to upscale lower-resolution images, providing better performance without compromising image quality. This makes the B580 an attractive option for content creators and professionals who rely on AI for tasks like video editing and 3D rendering.
Conclusion
If you’re a gamer then Intel Arc B580 is a perfect choice in it’s price range. The extra 12GB RAM also plates an important role especially when gaming at 1440P. Even with ray tracing turned on, it can beat it’s competition with ease because of those powerful 20 RT cores.
Although I’d like to mention here that if you are a working professional who need a GPU for productivity than RTX 4060 8GB is still the better choice because of the superior driver support and compatibility of NVIDIA overall. Also for AI workflows, NVIDIA is better choice because of wider support for many frameworks and AI engines.
