Arc B580 “without known problems”: Intel promises that it has learned from the Alchemist debacle

The Battlemage driver is supposed to run better than its predecessor. In addition, there are benchmarks that show that the Arc B580 has good potential as a Linux GPU.

Intel’s Battlemage generation will be available in stores at the end of the week. The Arc B580 will be released on December 13, 2024. However, there are still three questions that need to be answered before the new GPU goes on sale.

The first question is quickly answered at this point: the euro price of the Arc B580 is still not known. The only clue is still the listings of the custom GPUs from Asrock and Sparkle, which are listed at 320 euros and more.

Intel Arc B580: Next Geekbench Leak

The performance of the Arc B580 can now be classified in more detail according to Intel’s specifications, because the graphics card has reappeared in a Videocardz leak on Geekbench.

• Consequently, the Intel Arc B580 can score around 103,500 points in the Vulcan benchmark, around 30 percent ahead of its predecessor, the Arc A580.
• With this score, the Battlemage GPU outperforms both the Nvidia Geforce RTX 4060 and the AMD Radeon RX 7600 by a few percentage points.

Now, this is a synthetic benchmark and provides little information about actual gaming performance. Nevertheless, the decent score on the open-source interface offers reason for hope – especially for the Linux users among you, if the above-mentioned price plays along.

“We have learned from Alchemist”

For a successful gaming performance, a functional driver is much more important than the Geekbench score. Intel had to painfully realize this in the first months after the Alchemist launch, when numerous games ran with poor FPS on the manufacturer’s first GPU generation.

But according to Intel Fellow Tom Petersen, there is no need to fear a similar stuttering start with Battlemage. Petersen spoke about the upcoming GPU launch, among other things, in the “Full Nerd Podcast” and was of course also asked about driver quality.

Consequently, the Arc-B580 driver has “no known issues”. Intel has improved massively in the past two years in various DirectX generations, and there are no restrictions to be feared with the new Battlemage GPU.