Intel Arc B570 review: At $219, the cheapest good graphics card

Intel’s Arc B580 graphics cards have been its best-reviewed to date, maintaining the aggressive pricing of the old A-series Arc cards with fewer driver bugs, fewer weird performance outliers, and fewer caveats all around.

And this appears to be translating to retail success—the B580 is sold out across the board and difficult to find at its $249 MSRP. It’s hard to tell if this is because demand has been good or supply was low (Intel says it has been restocking “weekly,” for what that’s worth). But regardless, there’s clearly been some pent-up demand for an inexpensive-but-competent entry-level graphics card with decent ray-tracing performance and power efficiency and more than 8GB of RAM.

The Arc B570 is a less-powerful, less-interesting card than the B580, with fewer of Intel’s Xe-cores, less memory bandwidth, and 10GB of RAM instead of 12GB. But it offers performance very similar to the RTX 4060 for $80 less—at least, if Intel and its partners can keep it in stock at that price—which makes it a dramatically more interesting budget option than $200-ish cards like the GeForce RTX 3050 or Radeon RX 6600.

An Arc B580, but less

The B570 uses the exact same GPU silicon as the B580 but with a slightly lower clock speed and a couple of Xe cores disabled. Memory bus width has also been nudged downward, from 192-bits to 160-bits. The downgrades also give it a lower total board power of 150 W—quite a bit less than the 190 W of the B580, but still enough to require a single 8-pin power connector from your power supply rather than being able to get all of its power from your PCI Express slot.

The card’s 10GB of RAM just barely allows Intel to claim that the B570 is more future-proof than cards like the RTX 4060, which still ship with 8GB of RAM. Though 8GB won’t limit your performance much at the resolutions that the B570 is powerful enough to render, a little more memory can help in a handful of edge cases, even if it’s only 2GB.

Like the B580, the B570 ships with an eight-lane PCIe 4.0 interface, and Intel’s GPUs rely disproportionately on the Resizable BAR feature to perform optimally (also sometimes called ReBar, Smart Access Memory, or SAM, depending on your motherboard). Neither of these factors is a big deal if you have a PC made within the last five years or so, but it does make Arc a worse fit if you’re trying to upgrade an older system that uses PCIe 3.0 for the graphics slot or which doesn’t support ReBAR. Just something to be aware of if you’re trying to extend the life of an older desktop with integrated graphics.

Performance and power

On paper, you’d expect the B570 to run between 80 and 90 percent as fast as a fully enabled B580, and in our testing, that’s almost exactly what you get.

The B570 hovers at right around the same performance level as the RTX 4060 and the 8GB version of the Radeon RX 7600 in our tests—sometimes a little faster, sometimes a little slower, but never by more than a few frames per second in any direction. It’s also faster than the old Arc A750 and nearly as fast as the A770, with none of the game-specific performance dips (observe the Assassin’s Creed titles in particular).

Like the B580, it also keeps pace with Nvidia’s performance in games with heavy ray-tracing effects, taking roughly the same-sized performance hit as the RTX 4060 (though as a low-end card, even at 1080p you usually won’t get stable 30 or 60 fps rates in most ray-traced games without a little boost from DLSS/XeSS/FSR upscaling). This means it blows both the 8GB and 16GB Radeon RX 7600-series cards out of the water in games with heavy ray-tracing effects.

In these games at these resolutions—and again, we’re sticking to 1080p and 1440p, the resolutions this card will reasonably be able to hit—we don’t measure a ton of extra performance that we can attribute specifically to the difference between 8GB of RAM and 10GB of RAM.

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

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.

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