You either put up with whatever piece of junk you can scrape together or you compete against the AI industry to get your hands on a decent GPU: life has been pricey for gamers of late. But Intel's $250 Arc B580 video card, already exciting buyers, is proving its mettle in benchmarks. It outpaces not only the NVidia 4060 (~$300) but in many titles the 4060 Ti (>$400). In Red Dead Redeption 2, it goes toe to toe with the AMD RX770XT, which sells for nearly twice the price. Joel Loynds at PCGamerN:
What appears to be the major separation between Intel's GPU and the competition is the correct choice of VRAM. The meager 8GB of VRAM on both the RX 7600 and RTX 4060 has been criticized as a bottleneck for modern games, particularly when you play at 2,560 x 1,440. While it was a budget option, the RTX 3060 comparatively provided 12GB of VRAM, bizarrely giving it a bit more future-proofing than its successor.
Jacob Roach at Digital Trends notes early driver issues and plenty of titles where it isn't a winner in the benchmarks.
Overall, performance still swings in favor of Intel. Even matching the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 XT for $50 less is impressive, and in several games I tested, the B580 shows a large lead. Games like Black Myth and Dying Light 2 show that Intel still has some work to do, however. The performance in these titles is acceptable but largely offset by the big wins in games like Cyberpunk 2077 when looking at the performance overall.
Be wary of scalpers on the main retail sites taking advantage of the hype and buzz. These are $250 and there should be plenty to go around soon enough.
