Intel Arc B580 trades blows with the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 in early benchmarks — B580 beats A580 by up to 30% in OpenCL and Vulkan workloads

The Arc B580 (via VideoCardz) has been tested in Geekbench across the OpenCL and Vulkan APIs, beating its predecessor, the A580, by upwards of 30%. From the looks of it, these tests were likely conducted by a reviewer before the embargo, which is set to be lifted on December 12. Despite the apparent authenticity, take this leak with a grain of salt since synthetic benchmarks aren't perfect for real-world performance.

The test bench features Intel's flagship Core Ultra 9 285K, 48GB of fast DDR5-8400 memory, and Gigabyte's Z890 AORUS PRO ICE motherboard. As a strong contender in the sub $300 market, Intel touts its Arc B580 as 10% faster than the RTX 4060 while being cheaper. We'll verify Intel's first-party performance metrics in our review once the embargo lifts. However, it'll be unfair to say that the value proposition isn't strong—especially if the drivers are as stable as Intel claims.

Moving on to the benchmarks, we've sorted publicly available OpenCL and Vulkan scores for the most relevant GPUs and compared them against the Arc B580. Performance is mixed since we're looking at two different APIs with variable performance across different architectures. For a direct-gen-on-gen comparison, the B580 is almost 30% faster than the A580 in Vulkan, dropping to roughly 10% if we switch to OpenCL.

Interestingly, the Arc B580 loses to the RTX 4060 in OpenCL but redeems itself with a marginal 6% lead in Vulkan. AMD's RX 7600 falls behind in both APIs, which can be attributed to the architectural variations we mentioned above. Still, the B580 trails behind the RX 6700 XT, but the latter is a three-year-old GPU with a higher price tag.

There is no magical formula to convert synthetic numbers into real-world FPS. Likewise, Battlemage - as seen on Lunar Lake - is slower than Alchemist (Meteor Lake) if we go by the on-paper specs and synthetic tests but practically ends up 42% faster (at 720p) in games per our extensive testing.

Intel can reignite the once-forgotten budget GPU market if the drivers hold up, which we hope they will. Battlemage has a secret wildcard up its sleeve: hardware-enabled XeSS Frame Generation rivaling Nvidia's DLSS FG. With its new XeSS 2 suite of upscaling and interpolating technologies, Intel currently has an edge over AMD, but that may change with RDNA 4, rumored to employ AI-enabled FSR.