Intel's $249 Arc B580 is the GPU we've begged for since the pandemic | PCWorld
Intel's $249 Arc B580 is the GPU we've begged for since the pandemic | PCWorld
Powered by the new Xe2 "Battlemage" architecture and a new XeSS 2 frame generation feature, Intel's $249 Arc B580 is FINALLY bringing 1440p gaming to the masses.
If even half of Intel's claims are true, this could be a big shake up in the midrange market that has been entirely abandoned by both Nvidia and AMD.
All these weird numeric names. I'm gonna build a GPU and name it Jonathan.
69Pls no.
22Just don't name it Steve. You're in for a world of troubles with GPU Steve.
14Back to you, Steve.
2
The Arc cards actually have a really fun generational naming mechanic.
It's RPG classes. First gen was Alchemist. Second (what the article is about) is Battlemage. I'm guessing we're getting Cleric, Druid, etc.
9It's Celestial, so sayeth Steve
5
sorry, apple already took that one. call it Jeff or something.
8Hello, My name is Roger!
2Jonathan, what are you doing?
2
Intel GPU claims are NEVER true.
53Meh, I ended up with an A770 for a repurposed PC and it's been pretty solid, especially for the discounted price I got. I get that there were some driver growing pains, but I'm not in a hurry to replace that thing, it was a solid gamble.
34
If they double up the VRAM with a 24GB card, this would be great for a "self hosted LLM" home server.
3060, 3090 prices have been rising like crazy because Nvidia is vram gouging and AMD inexplicably refuses to compete. Even ancient P40s (double vram 1080 TIs with no display) are getting expensive. 16GB on the A770 is kinda meager, but 24GB is the point where you can fit the Qwen 2.5 32B models that are starting to perform like the big corporate API ones.
And if they could fit 48GB with new ICs... Well, it would sell like mad.
50I always wondered who they were making those mid- and low-end cards with a ridiculous amount of VRAM for... It was you.
All this time I thought they were scam cards to fool people who believe that bigger number always = better.
29Also "ridiculously" is relative lol.
The Llm/workstation crowd would buy a 48GB 4060 without even blinking, if that were possible. These workloads are basically completely vram constrained.
17Like the 3060? And 4060 TI?
Its ostensibly because they’re “too powerful” for their vram to be cut in half (so 6GB on the 3060 and 8GB on the 4060 TI), but yes, more generally speaking these are sweetspot for vram heavy workstation/compute workloads. Local LLMs are just the most recent one.
Nvidia cuts vram at the high end to protect their server/workstation cards, AMD does it… Just because?
1Like the 3060? And 4060 TI?
Its ostensibly because they're "too powerful" for their vram to be cut in half (so 6GB on the 3060 and 8GB on the 4060 TI), but yes, more generally speaking these are sweetspot for vram heavy workstation/compute workloads. Local LLMs are just the most recent one.
Nvidia cuts vram at the high end to protect their server/workstation cards, AMD does it... Just because?
1
An LLM card with quicksync would be the kick I need to turn my n100 mini into a router. Right now, my only drive to move is that my storage is connected via usb. SATA is just not enough value for a whole new box. £300 for Ollama, much faster ml in immich etc and all the the transcodes I could want would be a "buy now figure the rest out later" moment.
2
I’m reserving judgement of course to see how things actually play out but I do want to throw a cheapest pc together for my nephew and that card would make a fine centerpiece.
20Why not go for something like a steam deck or ayaneo as the main computer? I'm just wondering if that would be a good alternative for someone younger in terms of price and performance.
-1They might be wanting to build a proper desktop with RGB and all the jazz. While the Steam Deck does kick ass when plugged into a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, it’s not quite as impactful as a tower in terms of presence.
I use my Deck with the official dock all the time so I don’t disagree with Dindonmasker’s point that the value of a Deck is tremendous and a great alternative to building a tower.
8You're gonna get some framerate drops for sure. The Steam Deck internal screen is only 1280 x 800, which is how the games run so well on mobile hardware. That's as high as a monitor from the late 90s.
4
Funny the Radeon RX 480 came out in 2016 at a similar price. Is that a coincidence?
Incidentally the last great generation offering a midrange GPU at a midrange price. The Nvidia 1060 was great too, and the 1080 is claimed to maybe be one of the best offers of all time. Since then everything has been overpriced.The RX 480 was later replaced by the 580 which was a slight upgrade at great value too. But then the crypto wave hit, and soon a measly 580 cost nearly $1000!!! Things have never returned quite back to normal since. Too little competition with only Nvidia and AMD.
1930 series started to look like a return to good priced cards. Then crypto hit and ruined that. Now we have AI to keep that gravy train going. Once the AI hype dies down maybe we'll see cards return to sane pricing.
10I'm still rocking my RX480 and its going strong. Starting to show its age and not sure what I'll upgrade to next, but for now it works nicely.
2That was the RX 480 in 2016: 4GB for $199 or 8GB for $239. The RX 580 was an up-clocked version of the same design, released a year later.
Your point stands, though. Polaris was the last good-value midrange GPU. Everything since then has been underpowered or offensively overpriced. It would be nice to see something of that kind suitable for today's games at 1440p.
1
It's a pretty decent value when stacked up against RTX 4000 and RX 7000 GPUs.
But we're only a month or two from the next generation of Nvidia & AMD cards.
Those companies could even shit the bed for a second generation in a row on price-to-performance improvements, and the B580 will probably just end up being in-line with those offerings.
13Yeah,but by the time the 5060 is available, the tarrifs will have it at $450+.
10Yeah, I'll be curious to see how that all plays out.
Current GPU pricing still seems to have the 2019-2020 25% GPU tariff price baked-in. Note how prices didn't drop 25% when those were rescinded.
Do Nvidia & AMD factor those in their pricing and give consumer a break? Or do they just jack up prices again and aim for mega-profits?
Hell, will the tariffs even happen? At one point, those tariffs were supposedly contingent on U.S. Federal income taxes being abolished, and being used to replace that government tax income. The income tax part seems to have been dropped from the narrative ever since the election.
8I literally just fomod myself into a 7900 XTX today because of the possibility of the price hikes.
4
As someone with a 6650 XT, which is a little slower than the 6700 or 4060, I doubt the increased vram, which is of course still nice, is enough to push it for 1440p. I struggle even in 1080p in some games, but I guess if you're okay with ~40 FPS then you could go that high.
Unfortunately, if the 4060 is roughly the target here, that's still far below what I'm interested in, which is more the upper midrange stuff (and I'd love one with 16 GB vram at least).
At least the price is much more attractive now.
9Yeah, I've got a 6650 XT as well, and it's been great for what I want it to be. I play in 1440p, mostly older games and indie games, and even w/ newer games it gets an acceptable framerate (and yeah, 40 is acceptable).
That said, I'm interested in playing w/ VR and LLMs, and 12 GB VRAM just ain't it, I'd much rather get 16GB or more. However, I don't need top-tier performance, so something like a 15-20% uplift may be enough. I play exclusively on Linux, so good Linux support is really important (and this new card seems to hit that w/ FOSS drivers), but AMD provides better cards w/ more VRAM for not that much more money (can get 6800 XT for $100 or so more). That would last at least a couple years more than the B580.
But if I decide to build a desktop for my kids, maybe I'll try it out. $250 isn't a bad price, it's just not a very big uplift from what I've got. If they could add another 4GB VRAM and keep the price under $300, I'd be a bit more interested since that opens up entry-level LLMs.
1Yeah, 40 is just not for me. I rather go 1080p and hopefully get 75+ FPS. It's really hard to go back from that to something as choppy as 40, even 60 feels kinda bad now.
And yes, I use local LLMs too and 8 GB vram is kinda painful and limiting, though the biggest hurdle is still rocm & python which are an absolute mess. I'd love to get even more than 16 GB but that's usually for the high end segments and gets real pricey real quick.
Linux and me playing a lot of indie titles is also why I'd still avoid Intel, even if they had something in the upper midrange, but I still would've loved to see some competition in that area because then AMD would have to also deliver with their prices and that'd be good for me.
3
Dunno, realisticly speaking it is a slightly cheaper 7600, hardly a market shake-up.
8Seems like a decent card, but here are my issues:
- 12 GB RAM - not quite enough to play w/ LLMs
- a little better than my 6650 XT, but not amazingly so
- $250 - a little better than RX 7600 and RTX 4060 I guess? Probably?
If it offered more RAM (16GB or ideally 24GB) and stayed under $300, I'd be very interested because it opens up LLMs for me. Or if it had a bit better performance than my current GPU, and again stayed under $300 (any meaningful step-up is $350+ from AMD or Nvidia).
But this is just another low to mid-range card, so I guess it would be interesting for new PC builds, but not really an interesting upgrade option. So, pretty big meh to me. I guess I'll check out independent benchmarks in case there's something there. I am considering building a PC for my kids using old parts, so I might get this instead of reusing my old GTX 960, the board I'd use only has PCIe 3.0, so I worry performance would suffer and the GTX 960 may be a better stop-gap.
512 GB RAM - not quite enough to play w/ LLMs
Good. Not every card has to be about AI, there's enough of those already; we need gaming cards.
17Sure, I'm just saying what I would need for this card to be interesting. It's not much better than what I have, and the extra VRAM isn't enough to significantly change what I can do with it.
So it either needs to have better performance or more VRAM for me to be interested.
It's a decent choice for new builds, but I don't really think it makes sense as an upgrade for pretty much any card that exists today.
3
If their claims are true, I'd say this is a decent upgrade from my RX 6600 XT and I'm very likely buying one.
4Sounds like a ~10% upgrade, but I'd definitely wait for independent reviews because that could be optimistic. It's certainly priced about even with the 6600 XT.
But honestly, if you can afford an extra $100 or so, you'd be better off getting a 6800 XT. It has more VRAM and quite a bit better performance, so it should last you a bit longer.
5
There are some smaller Ollama Llama 3.2 models that would fit on 12GB. I’ve run some of the smaller Llama 3.1 models under 10GB on NVIDIA GPUs
3Its weird that Intel/AMD seem so disinterested in the LLM self hosting market. I get its not massive, but it seems way big enough for niche SKUs like they were making for blockchain, and they are otherwise tripping over themselves to brand everything with AI.
2Exactly. Nvidia's thing is RTX, and Intel/AMD don't seem interested in chasing that. So their thing could be high mem for LLMs and whatnot. It wouldn't cost them that much (certainly not as much as chasing RTX), and it could grow their market share. Maybe make an extra high mem SKU with the same exact chip and increase the price a bit.
4
Using ML upscaling does not qualify it as a 1440p card... what a poor take.
4How is compatibility with older games now?
Because I'm not buying a GPU unless it works with everything.
3We'll see come launch, but even the original Arc cards work totally fine with basically all DX9 games now. Arc fell victim to half baked drivers because Intel frankly didn't know what they were doing. That's a few years behind them now.
Intel designed their uarch to be DX 11/12/Vulkan based and not support hardware level DX9 and older drawcalls, which is a reasonable choice for a ground-up implementation- however it does also mean that it only runs older graphics interpreters using a translation/emulation layer, turning DX9 into DX12. And driver emulation is an always imperfect science.
12A lot of it will have been because half the game optimisation code was often inside the drivers.
So Intel devs may not know what they were doing, but game devs are often worse.
3
🤞🏼
3Although still behind AMD and NVIDIA on the performance front, from a design standpoint Intel is bringing their A game. The black limited edition card looks so slick.
2What's the chance of there being an B780? Rumors suggested its canceled... And they appear to be true?
1How would this compare to an AMD RX580? I can't find this in the usual charts
1I compared my Vega 56 with the RX 7900 GRE, which would be a 2.5x to 3x performance upgrade. I'd imagine the RX 580 to B580 swap would be in the same ballpark.
Looking at Vega's release reviews though, it was 40% faster than the RX 580. I assume your gains would be higher than 200%.
4