Intel announces Arc B580 and B570 "Battlemage" graphics cards with XeSS 2 frame generation

Intel has announced its first "Battlemage" discrete graphics cards, the Arc B580 and B570. As well as being the fastest Intel GPUs ever made, the $249 B580 and $219 B570 are also equipped with Intel's second-generation XeSS upscaling with frame generation and latency reduction. That's a promising recipe, especially if Intel is able to continue shoring up its driver support for newer games as we approach the release dates of December 13th (B580) and January 16th (B570).

Before we get into the specs and features, let's briefly recap the Arc story thus far. Intel released its first Arc discrete graphics cards in 2022, beginning with the Arc A380 and following up with the more powerful A750 and A770. The A380 was more of a proving ground, a novelty that offered excellent media capabilities but little raw grunt, while the A750 and A770 continue to offer reasonable value at roughly RTX 3060 levels of performance.

The new B580 and B570 are aiming higher, with a mandate to perform well at a 1440p resolution and ultra settings. This makes sense, given that high refresh rate 1440p displays have now hit mainstream prices - eg you can pick up a 27-inch 1440p 165Hz monitors for less than £150, making it the new baseline.

According to Intel's numbers, the B580 Limited Edition (equivalent to an AMD reference or Nvidia Founders Edition card) is on average 24 percent faster than the old A750 at 1440p and ultra settings. That includes sub-60fps averages in games like Dragon's Dogma 2, The Last of Us Part 1, A Plague Tale: Requiem and Total War Three Kingdoms; circa 100fps averages in games like Returnal, Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3 - all with XeSS; and circa 165fps averages in Fortnite, F1 24, Diablo 4 and Doom Eternal - all with XeSS once again.

Intel also promises "best-in-class performance per dollar" versus Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060, with 1.32x average raster performance across 47 games, and 1.25x average RT performance across nine games. AMD's entry-level Radeon RX 7600, meanwhile, is shown as achieving 1.06x and 0.88x performance versus the RTX 4060 across the same suite of games.

Internally, the BMG-G21 GPU and its Xe2 architecture delivers 70 percent extra performance per Xe-core and 50 percent extra performance per watt, mirroring improvements that Intel has made with its APUs as of late. These architectural improvements are quite wide-ranging, with 1.2x to 12.5x speed-ups to operations including compute dispatch, draw, pixel blend rate, mesh shader dispatch, vertex index cut, vertex processing, tessellation, ray triangle, ray trace and sampler feedback operations.

XeSS is key to the equation here, with Intel stating that 150+ games now support the technology, and average performance improvements range from 22 percent to 80 percent at 1440p and ultra settings - with a 47 percent improvement being the average. XeSS is also now compatible with the DX11 and Vulkan APIs, rather than just DX12.

As well as the existing super sampling tech, the new XeSS2 includes frame generation (XeSS-FG) and a latency mitigation solution (XeSS-LL) - a necessary component for frame-gen, but something that's also nice to have for more competitive games like first-person shooters. Demonstrating the features working together in F1 24, the B580 shoots from a 48fps baseline read-out to 93fps with XeSS balanced super sampling then 152fps when XeSS 2 frame generation is added to the mix.

The latency figures are also interesting, with 57ms of latency using native rendering, 32ms with XeLL, 19ms with XeSS + XeLL, and 28ms with XeSS, XeLL and XeFG.

Both XeSS frame generation and XeSS latency reduction require developer involvement, so adoption will take some time - but at least we won't see a similar situation to Valve banning Anti-Lag+ users in Counter-Strike 2, as AMD's universal latency reduction tech accessed game data without permission.

Ultimately, it's a promising setup, but with Nvidia's 50-series cards in the offing, Intel will need to continue to make big strides with their Arc graphics tech to stay competitive.

The company does seem to have kept its board partners on side for now, with Intel B-series GPUs on the way from Intel itself and six named partners: Acer (Nitro), ASRock (Steel Legend, Challenge), Gunnir (Photon, Index), Maxsun (I-Craft, Milestone), Onix (Lumi, Odyssey) and Sparkle (Titan, Guardian).

It'll be fascinating to see how these cards perform once they're available, and we'll be following up in due course once we have had a chance to test them out.