The Intel Arc B580 arrived with a far larger splash than many may have predicted when it launched simply forward of the vacation season final 12 months. The price range gaming GPU delivered efficiency that exceeded expectations and arrived at a really compelling worth. Nonetheless, additional testing has revealed that the cardboard’s efficiency doesn’t maintain up when run on some older techniques.
With the brand new Intel GPU beforehand making a powerful pitch for a spot on the most effective graphics card guides of the world, this new revelation may significantly harm Intel‘s push to consolidate its place.
The efficiency points have been found by tech testers {Hardware} Canucks, who posted a video to their YouTube channel discussing their take a look at outcomes. In it, they level out how preliminary testing with a contemporary, quick, CPU such because the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D ends in constantly glorious efficiency for the worth of the cardboard. Nonetheless, when testing with an older Intel Core i5 9600K CPU on a Z390 motherboard – a six 12 months previous system – the efficiency of the cardboard turns into much more variable.
Whereas a number of video games confirmed both no significant efficiency drop or had a 10-20% efficiency drop in keeping with the opposite GPUs on take a look at – the older CPU was only a constant limiting issue – in some video games, the Intel Arc B580 body price dropped off a cliff. As an example, in Warhammer 40K: Area Marine 2, the cardboard dropped from a 74.3fps common to 52.5fps, whereas most different playing cards solely dropped by round 10%.
An excellent worse instance is Spider-Man Remastered the place the Arc B580 dropped from a mean of 154.7fps to simply 74.9fps common. Which means it went from a chart-topping consequence when pitted towards the RTX 4060, RX 7600, RX 6700XT, and GTX 1660 Tremendous to being the slowest on take a look at. Sure, that’s slower than the six-year-old, mid-range, GTX 1660 Tremendous.
Different video games affected embrace Starfield and Hogwarts: Legacy, although the listing of unaffected titles does embrace loads of fashionable ones comparable to Cyberpunk 2077, Black Delusion Wukong, and Name of Responsibility: Black Ops 6. It’s simply that the listing of affected titles is critical too.
CPU utilization throughout their exams, {Hardware} Canucks conclude that the problem wasn’t the CPU being taxed extra when utilizing the Intel Arc B580 card and thus changing into a bottleneck. As an alternative, the CPU utilization was decrease, displaying that it’s the card itself that’s holding again efficiency. This, they conclude, hints on the problem being the Intel graphics drivers.
When Intel launched its first Arc GPU, the Intel Arc A770, it had points with efficiency in older video games due to a scarcity of driver optimization and it appears these new playing cards have the same problem however with older CPUs now.
{Hardware} Canucks reached out to Intel for remark and the corporate confirms that it may replicate a few of the efficiency points and that it’s actively trying into the problem. How lengthy a repair may take solely is determined by if the problem is a singular one that may be resolved with a couple of small modifications, or if every sport and older system is affected differently. We’ll have to attend on additional phrase from Intel to search out out.
Within the meantime, the Intel Arc B580 stays an honest price range improve for these on extra fashionable techniques. Nonetheless, each AMD and Intel are set to announce model new strains of gaming GPUs subsequent week on the CES 2025 commerce present, so we may see the entire graphics card market get shaken up, relying on what they announce. The rumors level to the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT and Nvidia RTX 5000 collection, however we’ll know extra in a few days.
