Intel’s Arc B580 graphics card impressed us a few months back, thanks to genuinely decent performance with plenty of VRAM at a mainstream price, but we never got around to reviewing the even cheaper B570 model – until now. That might not be such a bad thing though, as it’s meant that we could spend some real time using this GPU as it’s meant to be used, get an idea of availability and run some extra tests on the driver overhead issues identified by the tech press post-launch.
We’ll get into that stuff in a moment, but for now let’s answer a simple question: what separates this nominally $220 B570 card from the nominally $250 B580? The answer is not much – and that makes the B570 perhaps the more compelling of the two options.
Specifically, we’re looking at a drop from 20 Xe cores and RT units to 18, XMX AI engines go from 160 to 144 and core clocks drop by around six percent. The biggest change is to the memory subsystem, which moves from 12GB of GDDR6 on a 192-bit bus to 10GB on a 160-bit bus, so the B570 only has 83 percent of the bandwidth afforded to the full-fat B580. Power also drops significantly, from a rated 190W to just 150W on the B570.
Those power reductions feel nicely proportional to the cutbacks elsewhere, and testing supports that idea. Without spoiling the results on the following pages too much, the B570 achieves around 89 percent of the B580’s performance while drawing 88 percent of its power in games like Alan Wake 2, with a similar 87 percent of the performance for 88 percent of the power in Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2.