30 days ago, David and Plof downgraded
their GeForce cards for our one month Intel Arc Battle Mage Challenge, and I
am almost ready to give their old cards back. I don't need GPUs to Intel's more
power friendly Battle Mage B580. I don't
need a card that's meant for I don't need it, even 1440p gaming. I definitely
don't need it.
Or do you? Yes, but probably not for the
reasons you might think. Really? Crashes and bugs? Nope. Can't game at 4K? Not
that either. Okay, what is it? I really want to play Stalker 2. Oh, other than
that, the last 30 days went so smooth that it's actually been three more weeks
and I still haven't put my 4090 back into my computer. And I want to take a
moment to say, dear new Intel CEO guy,
please keep making these. My month wasn't as smooth smooth like this segue
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David, what went well for you over this past actually more than a month now?
We're at like 80 days or something. Really? It's flown by. Right. I was
really impressed with the performance of the B580. Me, too. Obviously, it's a bit
of a downgrade coming from a 3090 and a 7900 XT, and you have to turn down some
settings, set the internal resolution a little bit lower so I can hit that 60
FPS target for my living room TV. And so unless I was choosing to focus on it, I
really wasn't losing out on fun. And at the end of the day, isn't that what
matters? 100%. This whole experience really made me question the importance
of technical presentation NVIDIA game graphics. I was in the unique position
where my partner had no idea that I switched out the GPU. So that forced me
to re-evaluate my hyperfixation on sharpness and visuals and just join her
on her level when it came to just showing me vistas in a vow and being
wowed by them. And that's it. Initially, I was like, "Oh, that looks grainy and
upscaled, and oh, I can see the artifacts and the fur." But pretty
quickly, when I allowed myself to do it, I just started seeing the art instead of
just the graphics. And so, when games were working right, I'd say that I had a
really positive experience. But how about you, Mr. I own a display?
I also was pleasantly surprised by just how well everything kind of worked. Um,
I was also playing a lot of AAA games and I did the same thing. I didn't turn
my resolution down to 1080p, but I was upscaling constantly because NATO 4K is
just super hard to run. But, uh, God of War Ragnarok, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth,
Silent Hill 2, um, they all just ran pretty well as long as I stuck to low or
medium settings with upscaling. The only game that I pretty much gave up on was
Stalker 2. And I don't know if it's just
because it's a first person shooter and so I could really feel the lack of
frames uh, with the mouse a lot easier. I gave up on it real fast. I did run
into a bunch of upscaling weirdness that we'll kind of talk about later, but it
actually looked okay. It wasn't the worst I've ever seen. However, 12 gigs
of VRAM is just straight up not enough for native 4K. No, NVIDIA disagrees.
They're wrong. Fortunately, I don't need native. You know, uh XSS is pretty solid
and I'm on a 32-in 4K monitor, but I often play like pretty lean back like
this. So, you know, the distance is a bit more. I would look at textures and I
would nitpick. Like as soon as I turn on the game, I'd sit there and be like, "Oh, that looks ass and that looks bad."
But once I just actually started playing, that kind of goes away. Yeah.
Right. Like you really just start playing the game and you stop like looking at weird textures and stuff. You
you slowly stop noticing them. The one thing that really impacted my immersion
though was popping and like LOD pops,
level of detail pops. Even if the rock looks bad, when it like starts forming
differently as you get closer and closer or like background details start kind of
appearing, it's like, "Oh, that's not that's so jarring that it just pops in.
I don't like that at all." Yeah, I didn't have too many of those issues with the games I was playing where the
loss were popping cuz I agree. Any kind of pop in Yeah. super distracting or if
there's like really bad stairstepping or aliasing, that's really bad. But I was
usually able to get my settings to a place where the whole image was clear
enough and smooth and non-distracting. Yeah, for the most part it didn't affect
me. Like once I stopped worrying about it, it was totally fine. But what went
poorly? For me, the biggest issue was just stability. I've had more crashes in
the last 30 days than I had over the last several years combined. The worst
offender was the computer that I only ddued. I did it again with everything
checked off and I was getting like one to two crashes every couple hours.
That's a lot. It was mostly in Avowed, which is an Obsidian game, so that might
just be the Obsidian experience, not the Intel experience. And when I switched to
my other computer, which had a full Windows wipe, it was still getting
crashes and issues where like the whole computer would turn off or the game would crash itself, but overall it was a
much better experience. And now that I'm playing South of Midnight, I actually haven't had a single crash on that game.
And that's on the computer that was less stable. So, it might just be an Obsidian
thing. The other really big issue that I had was streaming video. And I'm not
talking Twitch where I'm like streaming over the internet. I'm just doing a
video call over Discord to an editor reviewing a video. Basically, it's video
playback in a browser while streaming and it couldn't do it. I've never had an
issue on any computer I've ever used, including like pretty lowowered laptops.
And it was so bad that I had to stop the streaming to the editor so they couldn't
see what I was looking at. And I would just tell them the time code. so they could scrub through and I found that
extremely frustrating. I also uh struggled with capture. I was trying to
stream a Dota match to a friend over Discord. Same thing pretty much.
Normally it's fine. You know, I have a 4090 probably and it does a great job. I
bet if the B580 was only acting as like
a capture card or that's all it was doing, it would be fine. And I get that
I'm gaming at 4K and that's not at all what these cards are for, but it
definitely struggled to just stream while gaming. And I imagine if we were
doing everything AV1, we probably wouldn't have had these issues. But
that's just not the state of streaming these days. We're not at everything is
using AV1. No, they're really not. Other than that though, I kind of struggled to
capture anything at 4K. So, for instance, I was doing a lot of like
print screening and just screen capping uh for random stuff. Even if I just took
a print screen of my monitors and then scrub through it and paint, it would
like chug. And that's just, you know, going up and down in paint. I also found
that I got a couple of graphical issues. They weren't major. You know, it was
just like Cloud's Puldron looked weird and FF7 is all sparkly at one point for
no reason. But aside from that weird texture issue, the biggest things for me was XSS. I noticed upscaling and it was
pretty good. It definitely looks more like DLSS3 than like one or two. But for
instance, with God of War Ragnarok, it was trying to upscale the preview
Windows when you go to upgrade your abilities. And that looked really bad.
It like it's like garbly. Like it genuinely looks like a awful mess. Like
I was completely just enraptured, you know, by the game and good to go. And I
went to go upgrade an ability and I was like, "Oh yeah, right. I'm playing on my B580." Playing on low, you'd
occasionally get like, "Oh, the water there looks terrible." Yeah. You know,
you'd come to a certain scene and all of a sudden you're reminded, oh yeah, I'm
playing on low. Or a character would be way off in the distance and you're not
normally looking at them, so it's fine. But all of a sudden, you look at them and their face is a blurry mess that
just looks terrible. But most of that I can ignore, right? I can I can kind of
tune it out and ignore it. I did have a few other more just performance issues.
For example, I was playing tabletop simulator with my cousin and I was
waiting for him to take his turn and so I booted up Nubbies Number Factory, which is just like a pegle uh rogue
light over here. 100% abs. Absolutely.
And normally that's fine. And I can play a game over TTS, especially a light game
like Nubbies or Boltro or whatever, but I would go to like launch my ball down
the Peggle path, and it would just like the frame rate on on Nubbies would just
tank. And then I encountered something similar in Bolatro. If I'm waiting for a
Dota match, I'll boot up Bolatro, put it
on my main screen, and it ran great
except for when I play a hand, it would chug for like just a second. And it's,
you know, it's not enough to make me stop playing Bellro or anything like
that, but it's just those minor smoothness aspects of it that I kind of
like that's what I'm paying for when I'm shelling out for like a bigger graphics
card. I'm I'm paying for everything to just kind of work smoothly and perfectly
at 4K specifically. I also did have one
crash. Okay, mine was really stable for the most part. Um, but I went to full
screen a web page while I had FF7 open. The whole thing just crashed so hard.
FF7 just crashed on me. Oh, my computer just came back. That took forever to the
point where I was about to shut it off when it like finally came back on. And
when it did, my sound was gone. There's no audio right now. It's totally busted.
I had to do a full reset of my system, like a full hard shutdown cuz it wasn't
even shutting down gracefully. Is your sound going through your GPU? Is it like a HDMI thing or was it just a headphone?
I don't know if it was just a weird driver crash or something cuz yeah, I
have a Go XLR and um that's got speakers
coming out of the Go XLR, but it was just gone. Like I tried YouTube, I tried
a couple other things. cuz I tried enabling like sound settings and stuff and it it was just it was just gone. I I
have no explanation for it. It didn't happen again, but it was bad. And last
and definitely least, uh I really wanted to play Halfife 2 RTX after we finished
filming and I went home and I sat down in my chair and I went
to Right. I've got a B580. It's It's not
going to play HalfLife 2 RTX at 4K, of
course. So, I just didn't even try. That doesn't mean I don't like it. I actually
liked this card so much that I went and bought one and it fits inside the
commuter bag from ltstore.com is great. It fits a B580.
That's all I needed to fit. One thing I neglected to mention when we were
upgrading our well downgrading our computers in the last video is that I
basically did this as a test to see what to upgrade from my 1660 Ti in my living
room computer cuz I never use it cuz the GPU isn't good enough for my 4K TV. It
turns out this card with 12 gigs of VRAM is totally valid. Like you can actually
game at 4K. You're going to have to turn stuff down, but it works. So yeah, I
bought the card and I'm super happy with it. I already installed it. That's an empty box. Way to go. And the best part
is I literally walked into a Memory Express and said, "Hey, I want a B580
and they had one and I paid like $35 over MSRP, but I got the Challenger OC
card." So that's like pretty typical for an AIB card to just pay, you know, a
little bit over. And uh I walked out. It
was how buying computer parts should be. I don't have to wait for anything.
Remember, those were the days. Yeah. I didn't buy one, but the rules stated
that if I sold the GPU and I was happy with the Ark, I could keep it. And I'm
pretty damn happy with the state of the GPU market. It took me literally five
minutes in one conversation to sell the 3090. And after realizing that Sharper
Graphics were adding a really questionable amount to my fun, I've
officially decided not to pay for a card that costs about a bajillion dollars
more than your arc over there. To be honest, my plan was to buy a 9070 XT at
the end of this because it just seems like a great value card, but I've
changed my mind with how hard it's been to find one that's not one of like the
triple OC super versions that costs like twice as much as MSRP. It's just really
frustrating. I'm so sick of the current state of the GPU market and I'm just
going to hold on to these B580s for another year or two and see how things
settle down and just play games. That
made it sound like you're keeping both B580s, but you're keeping Oh, I thought
you were keeping your 3090. No, I sold the 3090. Oh, but you have the 7900 XT.
I'm not I'm not going to I'm going to sell that one, too. Oh, you are? Oh, I
didn't know that. I'm done with 4K. Done with it. It's so stupid. It doesn't add
to your fun, but it looks so pretty. The thing that I've had to realize during
this challenge is that how much I've allowed myself to buy into the marketing
hype that is a cycle of constantly needing new tech. I get it. It's partly,
you know, natural training. Like as we've been shown better and better graphics for, wow, I need that. I need
that. I need that. And it's part of it is just the choice and just accepting
that like things can look a certain way and it's still beautiful. I think for me
a big part of going down that giant upgrade path started with shooters
because you feel it you feel a low frame rate a lot better with the mouse when I
was really trying to get into like Counter Strike and Valerant when that
first launched. That's when I was really like, "Oh, I need a better GPU. I need
faster memory. I need a better CPU." It was like a arms race. I am a little
nickpicky. I do I do notice this is right off camera
laughing at me. I I do I do notice like
DLSS even I notice lowquality textures. I notice a bad model. So there was this
like chasing the dragon that is quality. Mhm. And I've I've got it. I'm keeping
my 4090. And when I want to play like a really demanding game or something that
I want to look absolutely stunning and I don't want to just like, you know,
lounge back on my couch with a controller and and not really care about
that stuff, then I'll play on my 4090 on my computer in my den, whatever. and
that's fine. But it was it was very
refreshing to actually like stop caring about that stuff. The 49 is obviously a
greater card than most people watching this video have, but like you can be
excited for what you have and not constantly be chasing the next thing.
And there's so many games out there that like, yeah, there might be a big AAA
that you want to play that's a little more demanding and maybe you can't play
it right now and that does suck, but there's a lot of other games that just come out all the time. Like I've been
playing a ton of schedule one on the B580 and it runs, you know, great. And
even with the B580, it has all the modern features you need to get games
running. I think for a couple more years, if you have a card like that, you
can play the modern AAA games. And even when it becomes old enough that you
can't, there's so many games to fall back on. Literally hundreds of thousands
of games that I haven't played. Maybe it's a good time just to look back and
play some classics that I've always kind of just ignored. Totally. or look at your Steam library that's got a bunch of
unplayed games and maybe actually play them for once. But I guess the only
question now is, you know, what's going to happen in the future with Arc. It's
pretty clear that it's not going anywhere on mobile. The new laptop chips with Battle Mage X graphics are finally
competitive with AMD, even winning in some key areas. But Intel's whole
desktop lineup has been constantly just rumored that it's going to be cancelled.
Whether it's Alchemist in the early stages, oh, Alchemist did poorly, so
Battle Mage is done. And now the new B770 and B780s are rumored to be
cancelled. So like, what about Celestial? Like maybe that's canceled,
too. Who knows? I feel like it's the one thing that Intel is doing right these
days. I'm excited about these GPUs and the ways they can break forward. I've
heard from the script that I'm about to read that NextG Celestial is almost
certainly still going to have it on desktop, but I heard there was supposed to be a higherend battle mage card and
that's gone now. Yeah, there's like that sucks. It's I don't think there's going
to be a B780, which sucks cuz like imagine the cards we have. Yeah. Add
like $1 $150, but now 16 gigs of VRAM,
so I'm not, you know, I could do native 4K. Performance might be bad, but I'm not going to run out of VRAM. And then
four or six more XE cores, it would be
like a really, really solid lower
mid-range choice. I think we're on the cusp of graphics cards being competitive
again. things need to settle down uh with the import market uh being kind of
crazy and hopefully that does. But it's exciting that Intel finally has a card
that I think a lot of people will want. Again, please Intel, let the engineers
cook. Take your time. Battle Mage's competency has been pleasantly
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of a website or domain. Thanks for watching. Hope you guys enjoyed this
video. If you're looking for something similar, how about the time that Luke
and I tried original Ark Alchemist for a
month. I got to confess the reason I didn't want to do it this time was cuz I
was so scarred from that time. But it seems like it was fine. Yeah, that went
way for way worse for you guys. And this was actually pretty good. And I think it really depends on the kind of games you
play. Like you were saying, mouse and keyboard, it might not be ideal to lose
out on that amount of frame rates, but for you know, for platformers and action
games, 60 Hz is fine. Dude, back in the day, the overall system just buggginess
was a huge problem. Whereas, it seems like most of your stuff boiled down to I
think you have a bad INC is actually what I think it is possible cuz I've run
into similar issues on other Ryzen systems where swapping out the RAM helps
a little, but swapping out the CPU helps
a lot. So, um, and I know the lab hasn't
had any stability issues with B580. So, yeah, mine was pretty good. like I had
like one weird crash, but other than that it was totally fine. Um, it was
pretty solid all around. Like I actually I bought the card. I am blown away by
that. I bought the card. I'm putting it in my other computer. Blown away by that. in the 40.