Intel Arc B570 review: At $219, the cheapest good graphics card
We do see a hint of extra improvement in Forza Horizon 5, a game where the 8GB Radeon RX 7600 and the 8GB Intel Arc A750 do struggle compared to similar cards with a bit more RAM (Nvidia’s 8GB cards seem to handle it fine, though). An extra 2GB of RAM isn’t a ton, but it may be enough to make the difference with games that teeter right on the edge of being RAM-limited at 8GB. But as we saw with the 16GB RX 7600 XT, the majority of the time, the power of the GPU itself will still end up being the limiting factor.
Finally, the B570’s power efficiency when gaming is downright impressive, consuming around 30 W less than the B580, a little bit less than the RTX 4060, and a lot less than the RX 7600 (with the caveat that we are using software-reported power consumption figures, which aren’t as accurate as the power usage measured with specialized hardware, and comparisons between different manufacturers and different GPU architectures are imperfect). It seems safe to say that Intel’s Battlemage cards are quite competitive on power efficiency when they’re playing games, something that wasn’t really true of the A700-series GPUs.
It’s worth noting, as other reviewers have pointed out, that Arc’s idle power consumption is still fairly high compared to modern AMD and Nvidia cards, especially with multiple monitors connected.
A competent Nvidia alternative if you can’t get a B580 for $249
Intel’s Arc is making some headway, at least on performance and specs.
Credit:
Andrew Cunningham
Buying an Intel card still comes with some caveats, even if you’re only spending $220. Nvidia’s GPUs remain dominant and well-supported, and buying anything from any other company means you lose out on DLSS upscaling and the wider universe of AI and rendering software that takes specific advantage of CUDA or other Nvidia GPU features.
I’ve also got to wonder how devoted Intel will be to its graphics cards in the long term—Intel’s Michelle Johnston Holthaus said that the company remained “very committed to the discrete graphics market,” though that’s small comfort coming from a company’s interim co-CEO.
