Intel debuted its Xe2 graphics architecture in August as part of the Core Ultra 200V series — Lunar Lake — mobile CPUs. Now it’s incorporating the architecture into a new generation of its Arc discrete desktop graphics, the B series, with hardware and software updates that might help it gain a little more traction than the A series did.
The company’s positioning the $249 B580 and $219 B570 as 1440p cards, with more than 8GB memory to be able to handle ray tracing, and relying on its XeSS 2 upscaling and optimization technology — it adds frame generation (XeSS-FG), along the lines of Nvidia’s DLSS 3 optical flow acceleration and AMD’s Fluid Motion Frames — for improved performance and a low-latency capability.
There was a lot to like about the first generation of the Arc cards (I tested the A750), but it takes a lot of rolling the rock uphill to dislodge Nvidia — even AMD recently decided to give up competing on the high end. Intel claims better performance per dollar than the AMD Radeon RX 7600 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 on average, but it also takes more than that to nudge people from their buying or recommending ruts.
Intel Arc B-series specs
| Intel Arc B580 | Intel Arc B570 | |
|---|---|---|
| Memory | 12GB GDDR6 | 10GB GDDR6 |
| Memory bandwidth (GBps) | 456 | 380 |
| GPU clock (GHz, base boost) | 2.67 | 2.50 |
| Memory interface | 192 bit | 160 bit |
| Xe cores/Ray Tracing Units | 20 | 18 |
| Render slices | 5 | 5 |
| XMX AI engines/peak integer TOPS | 140/233 | 144/203 |
| TGP (watts) | 190 | 160 |
| Power connector | 8-pin | 8-pin |
| Connections | 3 x DP 2.1, 1 x HDMI 2.1 | 3 x DP 2.1, 1 x HDMI 2.1 |
| Bus | PCIe 4 x8 | PCIe 4 x8 |
| Starting prices | $249 | $219 |
| Ship date | December 13, 2024 | January 16, 2024 |
There will be a B580 Limited Edition, Intel’s in-house reference design, along with B570 models from third-parties, notably Acer (in the Nitro line) and ASRock (the Steel Legend and Challenger lines) among a handful of others. The cards are designed for low-power-PSU systems, with rated board power requirements of under 200 watts.
Like most competitors they fit into an eight-channel PCI 4 slot and use a single eight-pin power connector, which makes them options for upgrading fairly old systems or systems with low-capacity power supplies (like 500 or 600 watts). I’ll know whether it’s worth it after I test the card.
New capabilities
Frame generation relies a lot on machine learning to interpolate between two synthetically generated frames; there are two separate AI frameworks, one which calculates pixel-to-pixel changes (sequential static frames) and one for vector-to-vector changes (sequential motion trajectories). It then calculates the proper way to blend the two.
So to perform FG, it requires the upgraded XMX data types that launched with Lunar Lake; that means it’s not available for the older cards or Core Ultra 100 series integrated GPUs. They do use the same upscaling algorithms, though.
Along with XeSS-FG, the cards get Xe Low Latency, a click-to-display operation flow that syncs input devices with when the GPU needs the input to render to the screen instead of the more hurry-up-and-wait operation flow, which can introduce lag.
There’s a new driver-based low-latency mode as well. The updated Intel Graphics control panel adds several features that Arc owners have requested: more granular overclocking built into the app with a better interface, scaling methods and mode controls on a per-display basis and FPS in the performance metrics.
Intel has also updated its AI Playground software for the Arc GPUs, which aggregates various models — Stable Diffusion for image generation and others for chat, upscaling, stylizing and so on — to version 2.0.
