For anyone who thought Intel had finished with them, the announcement of the B570 and B580 is a blatant denial.
Just over two years ago, Intel launched ARC Alchemist graphics cards, with a range of five different models arriving little by little. Perhaps the same will happen in a few months' time with ARC Battlemage, the second generation of Intel graphics cards that some observers didn't want to believe in, but for the time being, we're only talking about two cards. To explain some people's pessimism, it has to be said that ARC Alchemist has not been a smooth ride for Intel, after a long-delayed release, drivers in full development at the time of launch and performance below expectations... from gamers who were perhaps a little too optimistic.
The two Battlemage boards compared © Intel
It takes a long time to get back into the race when AMD and NVIDIA are the real giants in the field. Intel has not given up, however. On ARC Alchemist, new drivers have been released at regular intervals to improve compatibility, fix bugs and boost performance. At the same time, Intel teams were working on the design of the second-generation ARC Battlemage, which Intel unveiled at the beginning of the week and for which only two boards are currently available: the B570 and B580.
ARC B580 versus ARC A750 (left) and GeForce RTX 4060 (right) © Intel
These two boards mark a number of architectural advances, in particular to take account of the explosion in the use of ray tracing in the latest major video-game productions. Intel has announced that these architectural advances should enable gains of 50% to 100%, depending on the situation, compared with ARC Alchemist boards. Intel also took the opportunity to announce that software monitoring would be more topical than ever, starting with the implementation of XeSS 2, the second generation of its super-sampling technology. What's more, XeSS 2 is accompanied by XeSS-FG to offer artificial intelligence-based image generation technology, and XeSS-LL to compensate for the increased latency induced by image generation.
Pricing and availability dates © Intel
For the time being, it's obviously far too early to know what impact all this will have on performance, but Intel is obviously quick to point out the significant benefits. It compares its ARC B580 with the previous-generation ARC A750 and NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4060, each time with rather flattering results for the Intel model. Intel boards should also be able to count on particularly aggressive pricing, with $219 and $249 respectively for the B570 and B580. Of course, we'll have to check that these prices don't explode in Europe and at the time of actual release. The release will take place in two stages: December 13 for the B580 and January 16 for the B570. Note in passing that France will not be part of the first delivery salvo: we'll have to wait until January for French stores to have cards for sale.
