Intel Arc B580 Battlemage finds a spot near Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD Radeon RX 6700XT in Geekbench’s tests. This new mid-ranger seems to offer a noticeable performance uplift against its predecessor.
According to these Geekbench results, Intel’s upcoming Arc B580 GPU is 9% faster than its predecessor, the Arc A580, in the OpenCL test, putting it slightly behind AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT by 1% and RTX 4060 by 3%. Nice, but that’s nothing compared to Vulkan results, which show B580 blast past A580 by 30%, putting it up to 9% ahead of the corresponding competition.
That said, even assuming this 30% performance uplift remains intact for real-world tasks, it’s still lower than its price hike would suggest. For reference, B580 costs $249, which is 39% higher than A580’s $179 MSRP. But, at least we get 4GB more VRAM that will surely be handy when playing Indiana Jones.
Moreover, though not apples to apples, these results are also far from what Intel has announced during its presentation. As a reminder, the brand expects its B580 GPU to beat Nvidia’s RTX 4060 by 10% using a 47-game average. It also claimed that this chip is 24% faster than the higher-tier A750. Though impressive, the latter comparison seems more reasonable since the Battlemage architecture should be faster at ray traced games, widening the gap.
All of this is well and good, but these comparisons will soon be previous-gen when Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 Series and AMD Radeon RX 8000 cards arrive. Depending on how the competition will react, Team Blue may have to change plans to remain competitive by, let’s say, slashing prices.
Lastly, while these synthetic benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt as they don’t paint a perfect picture of real-world performance, they are promising to say the least. Unless the drivers turn out to be unoptimised in some way, we should see a close enough boost in gaming, at least using the Vulkan API. Thankfully we don’t have long to wait as dedicated reviews should start popping out next Thursday.
