Intel Unveils the Arc B580 and B570 “Battlemage” Graphics Cards Featuring XeSS 2 Frame Technology

Intel has unveiled its initial “Battlemage” discrete graphics cards, the Arc B580 and B570. As well as being the most rapid Intel GPUs ever produced, the $249 B580 and $219 B570 also feature Intel’s second-generation XeSS upscaling with frame enhancement and latency reduction. This is an encouraging combination, especially if Intel can continue to improve its driver support for newer games as we approach the release dates of December 13th (B580) and January 16th (B570).

Before we delve into the specifications and components, let’s briefly summarize the Arc journey so far. Intel introduced its first Arc discrete graphics cards in 2022, starting with the Arc A380 and then brought out the more powerful A750 and A770. The A380 was more of a proof of concept, showcasing great multimedia capabilities but limited raw performance, while the A750 and A770 continue to deliver considerable value at approximately RTX 3060 levels of performance.

The new B580 and B570 are targeting higher ambitions, designed to perform well at a 1440p resolution with ultra settings. This strategy makes sense, as high-refresh-rate 1440p monitors are now becoming widely affordable – for instance, you can find a 27-inch 1440p 165Hz monitor for less than £150, establishing a new baseline.

According to Intel’s data, the B580 Small Edition (comparable to an AMD reference or Nvidia Founders Edition card) is on average 24 percent faster than the previous A750 at 1440p and ultra settings. This includes sub-60fps averages in titles like Dragon’s Dogma 2, The Last of Us Part 1, A Plague Tale: Requiem, and Total War: Three Kingdoms; around 100fps averages in games like Returnal, Cyberpunk 2077, and The Witcher 3 – all with XeSS; and approximately 165fps averages in Fortnite, F1 24, Diablo 4, and Doom Eternal – all with XeSS once again.

Intel also promises “best-in-class performance per dollar” compared to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4060, achieving 1.32x average raster performance across 47 games, and 1.25x average ray tracing performance across nine games. Meanwhile, AMD’s entry-level Radeon RX 7600 is reported to achieve 1.06x and 0.88x performance compared to the RTX 4060 across the same suite of games.

Inside, the BMG-G21 GPU and its Xe2 architecture delivers 70 percent more performance per Xe-core and 50 percent more performance per watt, reflecting improvements Intel has made with its APUs in recent times. These architectural enhancements are notably extensive, with increases ranging from 1.2x to 12.5x in multiple operations including compute dispatch, draw, pixel blend rate, mesh shader dispatch, vertex index cut, vertex processing, tessellation, ray triangle, ray tracing, and sampler feedback operations.

XeSS is crucial to the equation here, with Intel indicating that over 150 games now support the technology, and average performance gains range from 22 percent to 80 percent at 1440p and ultra settings – with a 47 percent increase being the typical result. XeSS is also now compatible with the DX11 and Vulkan APIs, as well as just DX12.

Besides the new improved sampling technology, the updated XeSS2 includes frame enhancement (XeSS-FG) and a latency reduction tool (XeSS-LL) – an important feature for frame generation, but also beneficial for competitive games such as first-person shooters. Demonstrating the features in F1 24, the B580 jumps from a 48fps baseline to 93fps with XeSS balanced sampling, then up to 152fps when adding XeSS 2 frame enhancement into the mix.

The latency figure