I've never taken Intel's GPU competition seriously,…

I've never taken Intel's GPU competition seriously, but the Arc B580 has left me no choice - it just surpassed the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 in Vulkan benchmarks

A pair of Intel Arc Alchemist chips in front of a dark purple background.

Intel's Battlemage Arc B580 GPU just scored higher than the RTX 4060 in Vulkan testing
AMD's RX 7600 loses to both Nvidia and Intel GPUs in Vulkan tests
The new GPU will launch on December 13, for $249 / £249 / around AU$439

It's easy to place AMD and Nvidia as leaders within the GPU market, with the latter's RTX 4000 series currently dominating over the RX 7000 series - but Intel is about to shake things up, with the Arc B580 defeating both the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 GPUs in Vulkan benchmark tests.

According to Tom's Hardware (based on public benchmark tests), the Intel Arc B580 loses out to Nvidia's RTX 4060 in OpenCL API (which is irrelevant for gaming) but successfully defeats Team Green's GPU with a 6% lead in Vulkan (one of the APIs used for most games).

The Battlemage GPU is priced at $249 / £249 / around AU$439 which is cheaper than the RTX 4060 at MSRP ($299 / £289 / AU$545), and it's purported to be the faster GPU (especially equipped with 12GB of VRAM). If there's anything to take from this, it's that Intel is suddenly in pole position to reignite the budget GPU market and take the lead - though doing so will depend on AMD and Nvidia's CES 2025 reveals.

Say goodbye to 8GB GPUs with Intel...

Team Red has already made it clear that its focus has shifted from high-end GPUs to mid-range options, with a strong emphasis on AI upscaling going forward with FSR 4 (much like Nvidia's continuing focus on AI for DLSS 3's successor). With this in mind, I'm optimistic about what both have to offer at CES in January when it comes to budget options.

The Intel Arc B580 will feature 12GB of VRAM, while the cheaper B570 will utilize 10GB of VRAM - 8GB of VRAM is nowhere near enough to tackle games today, and it's great to see that Intel abandoning this long-standing staple of affordable GPUs. More and more triple-A titles are demanding more VRAM for consistent performance and after Apple's move away from 8GB of unified memory (shared RAM between the CPU and GPU) for Macs, I'm expecting Nvidia and AMD to follow suit.

Spotted by VideoCardz, XeSS Frame Generation has been leaked and is now available for Intel GPU owners to use via Nexus Mods - AI upscaling has been the talk of the town for PC gaming for improved frame rates and image quality, and now that Team Blue has joined the party, there is room for competition in the budget GPUs arena.

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