I can't believe it after NVIDIA and AMD
just completely abandoned the sub $300 price point or gave us intentionally
nerfed options Intel has finally done it
they released the first good budget GPU in over 5 years it doesn't cut any
Corners it's got 12 gigs of vram which means that new games like Indiana Jones
will run properly it's relatively efficient and best of all it's got raw
performance that beats the RTX 46 handily at both 1080P and 1440p if I had
scripted Intel's press conference for this thing it probably would have gone
something like this 49 it's been a
difficult journey to get here for team blue their first generation had famously
buggy drivers with some games running poorly or even not at all which led to
such low sales figures that the department has been the subject of near
constant speculation that it would be cut but believe it or not they have
squashed most of the bugs most of them
we'll talk about that later first the tldr last time we asked viewers to
consider buying Intel Arc because we were desperate for them to emerge as a
disruptor in the GPU duopoly this time
we're asking you to consider Intel Arc because it's freaking awesome to the
point where I would say that it is the only choice for gamers who want to spend
$450 to $700 on a tower or for those
folks who have waited so patiently for an upgrade to their faithful GTX 1660 or
or 10 series it's time to bag up that old GPU wait wait don't throw me out yet
let me out oh no sell to our sponsor
Jawa instead why let your old Hardware collect dust when it can collect cash
check out Jawa below and get an extra $10 on top of your base offer until the
end of this year let's start at 1080p
where AMD and NVIDIA are more than happy to gou you for the luxury of being able
to play First St City in cyberpunk the
b580 makes an impressive debut running neck and neck with the 4060 TI 16 gig a
card that retails for $450 you heard me this one is 80% more
expensive and check out the b 580s direct competition the $300 460 and the
$250 RX 7600 they're behind by nearly
15% and Intel's lead increases in Red
Dead Redemption 2 where they improvements to Vulcan support have lifted The Fortunes of even their last
generation cards and brought the b580 in line with the 7700 XT a
$400 GPU this kind of utter dominance
though isn't across the board in The Last of Us Part One the b580 falls back
in line but then even this poor result has them beating NVIDIA and AMD's
current Generation price competitors in f123 AMD takes the lead but they've
historically performed really well on the track and in the old but gold shadow
of the Tomb Raider the b580 barely inches past the RTX 460 in average FPS
and loses in 1% lows which we classify
as a loss in returnal the b580 is neck and neck with the 4060 TI and the 6700
XT only taking a clear L from the 7700
XT which again I remind you is a $400
card and then finally in atomic heart the b580 sales lose some of their
glorious wind but hey the most expensive
card on the charts was bound to win at least one game wasn't it looking at the
overall picture Intel you've outdone yourself you've pulled off a commanding
generational uplift of 55% and beaten
your old Flagship even by more than 20%
you've Fallen shy of the 4060 TI but the bottom line is if Gamers out there are
looking to upgrade their Aging gpus for high refresh rate 1080p gaming you've
given us something to finally recommend to them not just point at the least
worst thing but to recommend to them
this is a truly incredible achievement for Intel and they did a lot to make it
happen their new BMG g21 so
interestingly they don't call it a GPU leaves no stone unturned in the search
for performance improvements they've jumped to a new process node and made
several architectural and Driver overhauls that Intel claims gave them a
70% Improvement in performance per core and a 50 % energy improvement over last
gen which makes me wonder why did they hold back if 20 xc2 cores is good then
32 cores on a b770 would be better
speaking of bigger nearly 37% of steam users are gaming at a resolution that is
greater than 1080p these days and that number keeps growing as 1440p and 4K
monitors continue to come down in price so can Intel compete at 1440p as well
the short answer is yes across our suite
of benchmarks the b580 overtakes the RX 6700 XT and narrows the Gap with the
4060 TI to just a few perc as for
Intel's promised 10% lead over the 4060
well it appears they were actually being modest across our game selection we
found a lead of 20% though it is worth
noting that this will vary depending on game selection starting with the
famously vram hungry The Last of Us Part One the b580 holds its position on our
chart embarrassing NVIDIA again with the b580 is 1% lows besting the 460s average
FPS shadow of the Tomb Raider demonstrates just what an incredible
generational leap Intel has pulled off here and it seems like something about
returnal really likes Intel because all of our team blue cards get a nice little
bump in the rankings I'm kind of running out of ways to say Intel's doing well so
um in Red Dead Redemption 2 Intel did
bloy and in cyberp Punk they blomen the
competition while making it glaringly obvious just how overdue the 1060 and
the 1650 were for a valid modern 1440p
upgrade with strong if not mind-blowing performance in both atomic heart and
f123 it's clear that Intel has achieved what they set out to do made a killer
value 1080p gaming card that's also capable of 1440p there are some caveats
even Intel admits that they don't win in every game and a motherboard with
support for resizable bar is mandatory for Arc gpus and the b580 isn't a
top-of-the-line Benchmark Buster so if you have a higher tier older card like a
3060 TI you shouldn't feel compelled to upgrade here but as far as downsides go
those are pretty minor and there's more to like than just the raw performance
let's talk about Ray tracing which is a little more relevant these days all of a
sudden than it used to be especially when you consider the games are starting
to list rate tracing as a minimum requirement while we didn't have time to
develop a test for our boy Indie we did check out the RT performance in a few
other games tracing those Rays still results in a significant performance hit
but NVIDIA's mature and well supported RT Tech allows them to beat the b580 in
a big way in atomic heart at 1080p in returnal the b580 catches right back up
to the 4060 TI but falls back into the pack in f123 overall you can have a
solid plus 60 FPS R Trac gaming experience a assuming you're willing to
fiddle with the settings just a little bit speaking of which alra settings at
1440p that's beyond the reach of pretty much every card we've tested today the
entire lot failing to break 60 FPS average in any title but the extra vram
on the b580 earns a a sizable lead over the 4060 in returnal and in f123 even if
it can't pull out a win in atomic heart AMD's RX 7600 o it's basically crying in
the corner trying to figure out why it's even here and if you're wondering where the flagship R tracing title cyber Punk
is well uh we had some Intel problems it seems
to not like running at Ultra Ray tracing settings on CPUs with 3D vcash but
before you start hanging Intel about game compatibility they are aware and
they are working on it look Mom we made the patch notes and since the launch of
Arc compatibility has massively improved Hardware box recently showed in a test
of 250 games that 233 were completely
playable there were still issues and some of those were in major titles that
took a lot longer to fix than we would have liked but hopefully Intel will
continue this upward Trend in compatibility now knowing the price and
the 1440p performance numbers you wouldn't expect this to be a 4K gaming
card and you'd be right it's not a 4K card even in low settings in cyberpunk
we don't see great frame rates at least
not natively but Intel's got some more tricks up their sleeves desperate to not
completely miss the boat on the AI boom Intel has packed some juicy AI into the
b580 in order to up its performance oh I guess if I'm going to talk about AI I
might as well dress the part with my tech bro vest from LTT
store.com Intel's AI powered render enhancement sauce comes in the form of
xs2 xss 2 has three main parts an AI
upscaler that renders the game at a lower resolution then uses AI to upscale
to your display resolution xss frame generation which creates extra frames by
interpolating Visual and in-game Vector data and then taking the two frames and
making a middle point to enhance animation smoothness and a latency
reduction component that helps to cancel out some of the extra latency from the
aforementioned frame generation in fewer words they've invented NVIDIA dlss
NVIDIA frame gen and NVIDIA reflex and what's nice is that unlike the time that
AMD invented Invidia reflex with anti-le plus Intel has implemented this in a way
that the game developer bakes it into the game meaning you won't get permaband
for turning it on we're not going to be doing a deep dive into image quality at
this time but we will'll be looking at performance and we will make some
anecdotal remarks about image quality xss has already proven itself to be a
solid upscaling technology and xcss 2 successfully builds upon that Foundation
when turning on super sampling to its highest quality level in cyberpunk 2077
at 1440p Intel wins an FPS thanks to the raw performance advantage that they
already had but their super resolution solution doesn't scale as well NVIDIA
sees a performance uplift of 42 and 32% in the lows and averages respectively
while while Intel only gets around a 20% boost we see the same Trend at 4K the
b580 doesn't gain as much performance from xss as NVIDIA does from dlss but
wins by just being a more powerful card the 4060 though it doesn't even hit 30
FPS here but the story changes a bit in f124 the only title currently available
for us to test XS 2's frame Gem and this
is where things get wacky in this game the upscales are better matched but in
frame gen it's a blowout Intel is
introducing way more generated frames with performance skyrocketing to 70%
over the upscale result and double over native rendering and it is almost
indistinguishable from native rendering unless you really know what to look for
and if you ignore those Tire artifacts that arise from the upscaling not the
frame gen it's weird it has doubled the FPS with barely a drop in quality heck
you can even get over 100 FPS at 4K with xss turned on granted Intel probably
worked pretty closely with the devs to make sure that this launch title would
leave a good impression but a good impression is a good impression while
Intel pitched this as a gaming card first and formost they did include some
other value ads like their enhanced media engine that now supports more
codex than NVIDIA or AMD in modern av1
encoding we can see a clear generational uplift but Intel can't quite match the
speed of NVIDIA's nank encoder and it's worth noting here by the way that while
AMD does compete on this chart it does so by outputting the wrong resolution
1920x 1082 and yes that is a hardware
level problem yikes in the more ubiquitous h264 the b580 snatches the
crown although margins are pretty small across the board here now thanks to
their Optics rendering blender sees some good old fashioned NVIDIA domination at
least on the cards that have rt cores and interestingly the b580 performs
significantly worse than Intel's last gen cards Intel told us this is expected
but didn't really go into why our best guess then is that it's due to the
relatively smaller number of XE cores on this card compared to the last gen but
that didn't slow it down in gaming so yay gaming moving into our AI testing
NVIDIA's dominant position means that most AI software is developed with Cuda
in mind making it easy for folks at home to get up and running quickly the good
news is things are getting easier for AMD and Intel users and if you want to
run some computer vision large language models or image generation at home you
can probably get it working on your non- envidia GPU in a few extra steps and
generationally Intel has made a massive leap in performance taking the lead in
our stable diffusion image generation Benchmark by a pretty big margin in
computer vision it loses to the 460 although just barely so if you can get
it running it works great as long as you don't mind using a bunch of power to
generate a portrait of your ant as an actual ant speaking of power we haven't
even talked about power yet the physical PCB of our card is stinky and Intel
takes advantage of this by implementing a new flowthrough cooler design thermals
are well under control with the hot spot on the b580 never passing 76° in either
synthetic or gaming workloads the b580 is targeting a TDP of 190 Watts that's
25 watts more than the RX 7600 and 460
TI and 75 Watts more than the 4060
non-ti so it's clear that even with all of their improvements Intel does have a
ways to go with NVIDIA pulling off a clean Victory when it comes to
Performance per watt even if NVIDIA doesn't seem to understand what
performance per dollar is the b580 uses
just one PCIe 8 Pin for power so you won't need to upgrade your power supply
that is unless you have a power supply that is less than 600 W even though it
should only draw a Max of 225 Watts with that power connector we saw some
transient spikes up to 241 watts in F1
that is significantly higher than Intel's advertised 190 Watts so in
conclusion maybe it's just cuz it's been so long since we've seen a great budget
card but man I'm excited like how many
times have I had to say well you could buy this shiny new thing but it kind of
sucks and you'd be way better off going with something last gen or secondhand or
just not upgrading at all well not today
I mean eBay deals obviously still exist but but this is a new GPU that doesn't
suck with modern features and it's worthy of Celebration even if Intel is a
little late to the party see the thing is AMD and NVIDIA are poised to release
their next generation of gpus early next year so it isn't out of the question for
a couple of companies that have had their stock prices double or 10 uple to
make a move to Nuke Arc B series from orbit also the looming thread of tariffs
could impact the affordability of these cards but hey it's going to be a pretty
sweet ride up until that time it's a great GPU that will give you great
performance without destroying your wallet hold on scrap that bulky wallet
anyway because a sponsor Ridge is having a holiday sale you can get up to 40% off
lots of people here already use rich and I'm going to buy some for people who
don't but lonus is paying for it well lus is filming on set I've been hiding
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cookie shop at rich.com and recycle L's all wallet oh well thank you this is for
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we'll have the link in the video description if you guys enjoyed this
video go check out our review of the original Arc the benchmarks and graphs
aren't really relevant other than to give you the context for how far we have
come this is truly a wonderful achievement for Intel and for the world
and Canada 249