Intel Arc B580 Battlemage Review: A Mighty Midrange Gaming GPU
The games on this page aren't necessarily the latest or greatest, but what they have in common is that they tend to be extremely demanding. That makes them prime pickings for GPU performance benchmarking.
Fortnite Battle Royale Benchmarks
Fortnite is surely a game that needs no introduction at this point. We tested it by playing a round in the Zero Build Battle Royale mode, getting a few kills, and then playing back the replay of that section while monitoring the frametimes.
Elden Ring Open World Benchmarks
You may think Elden Ring is too old to bother testing, but in fact, it's actually extremely demanding thanks to the ray-tracing features added in a patch before the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion came out. That add-on is so voluminous that the Game Awards this year, the Geoffs, decided it can be a contender for Game of the Year.
Mark down another win for the Battlemage. Coincidentally, my Elden Ring character is a battlemage. It doesn't have the best framerate consistency here, but Elden Ring is not the most consistent game in the best of times, so we're chalking this one up to FromSoftware, not Intel.
Guardians Of The Galaxy Benchmarks
Some folks sneered at the Guardians of the Galaxy game because it didn't license the likeness of the film actors, instead preferring to stick to the comic book's designs. That's a shame, because this is actually a really well-put-together package of enjoyable Guardians humor and action combat setpieces.
Guardians of the Galaxy is another title that was problematic on the Arc B580. We put some time into trying to fix this, but the result was fairly consistent. It seems like something is just broken here. We also saw minor visual artifacting in the game's built-in benchmark. Probably wait for a driver update before playing this one on Battlemage.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Benchmarks
A new title for our test suite, Flight Simulator 2024 is the latest release in the long-running franchise. This title had some strange frame-rate consistency issues across every single GPU we tested that are likely unrelated to the GPU itself, so we're reporting average framerates here.
Arc B580 did very well in this test, only losing out to the powerful RDNA 3 Radeon card. Don't get too attached to seeing this one in the benchmarks, though. This game is both a pain and time-consuming to test, and worst of all, it gleefully dumps tens of gigabytes of cache data on your system disk without warning. So be warned, I guess.
Hogwarts Legacy Wizarding Benchmarks
Whatever you think of the Harry Potter franchise, Hogwarts Legacy is absolutely worth a play if you like open-world action games. The creators poured an incredible amount of love into the title and it really goes a long way toward recapturing the Harry Potter magic for fans, but even if you're not a fan, there's a ton to enjoy here, from engaging magical combat, terrifying nighttime exploration, broom-bound aerial acrobatics, and more.
It also happens to be a punishingly-demanding Unreal Engine 4 title with back-ported ray-tracing and generous texture budgets. Our 8GB cards struggle mightily under the weight of this game's Ultra settings, to say nothing of the fact that we're outputting a 4K image. XeSS already looked amazing in this game, but paired with the powerful Arc B580, the experience is transformative.
Street Fighter 6 World Tour Benchmarks
For the first time, Street Fighter 6 adds a single-player story mode to the popular one-on-one fighting game. Players create a custom character and travel around the world learning moves from the World Warriors. Not only does it have large open maps with a lot of characters, it also supports a 120-FPS maximum frame rate, unlike the main fighting mode. We tested in the ludicrously-detailed Nayshall region.
Starfield Benchmarks
Bethesda's latest game release was undeniably a hit on launch, but the hype has faded a bit since then. It's still a punishing title for PCs, and it's also known to be unfriendly to Intel GPUs, so let's see if that's still the case.
Teardown Voxel Benchmarks
Teardown is an indie game primarily created by a single individual that relies on voxels for all of its in-game objects. This gives it a number of very interesting advantages, technologically, such as the ability to do full path-traced global illumination very cheaply due to the low-rez voxel environments and objects. Rather than using hardware RT acceleration, though, it's all done in regular GPU compute.
F1 2024 XeSS FG Benchmarks
If the numbers on this next chart look really extreme, that's because we tested it using frame generation. This technology essentially doubles the frame rate of your game as long as you have the CPU and GPU headroom available to do the frame generation processing. Since we're effectively applying a multiplier to the frame rate, it makes the differences in these GPUs look bigger than they are.
We used DLSS frame generation on the NVIDIA cards, AMD FSR3 frame generation on the Alchemist and Radeon cards, and then the new XeSS FG on the Arc B580. As you can see, the Arc B580 handles this game with aplomb, even with the settings set to "Ultra High", which makes this sim racer quite the visual feast.
We didn't do dedicated testing of XeSS FG for this review, but speaking subjectively, it seems to be functionally similar or even equivalent to NVIDIA's DLSS Frame Generation. DLSS FG can generate visual artifacts, but due to the high frame rates, it's usually very hard to notice them. Likewise, we couldn't spot anything out of place with XeSS FG, although it's worth noting that F1 2024 is basically a best-case scenario for frame-generation technology with its clean presentation and uncluttered environment design. We're eager to see it in more chaotic games to see how it holds up.
Dragon's Dogma 2 Benchmarks
On its release early this year, Dragon's Dogma 2 caught a lot of attention for its extremely CPU-limited nature in towns. This sort of distracted everyone from the fact that it's also extremely GPU-heavy at all times. The game is well known to hate Alchemist; let's see how Battlemage does.
Not too bad. A wholly playable experience, and just ahead of the GeForce RTX 4060, which is exactly where Intel said the card would be. Solid stuff; no notes.
Cyberpunk 2077 Ray-Tracing Benchmarks
Our last game benchmark is going to be Cyberpunk 2077. If you were waiting for it, well, here it is. We were surprised at these results, so we ran them numerous times to make sure they were accurate... and they were.
That's right—this is basically a shot right across NVIDIA's bow. The green team has used Cyberpunk 2077 to show off its latest rendering technologies more than once, and many a PC hardware fan or PC gamer will tell you that the game is an "NVIDIA title", meaning that it runs well on GeForce and not as well on Radeon.
That's not really the case, though, even in Ray Tracing: Ultra mode, as you can see above where the B580 kicks down the door and takes the top spot in our testing, proving that it has both strong raster and ray-tracing performance. What about the vaunted Ray-Tracing Overdrive mode that uses full-on path tracing, then?
So far, B580 has impressed us quite a lot, but there's nothing impressive about having the fastest GPU in the room if it's sucking down a thousand watts. Does Battlemage improve on Alchemist's frankly poor power efficiency? Head to the next page to see our power observations...
