Intel announces its new Battlemage graphics cards, and they might just be the 1440p budget champions we've been waiting for

Intel officially announced its latest discrete graphics cards on this week, the Intel Arc B580 and Intel Arc B570, based on its next-gen Xe2 graphics architecture.

Targeting the budget gaming segment, the new flagship Intel Arc B580 GPU features 20 Xe-cores, 20 ray tracing units, 160 XMX AI Engines and 12GB GDDR6 memory with a 192-bit memory interface, specs that could make it a very competitive 1440p graphics card.

The Intel Arc B570, meanwhile, features 18 Xe-cores, 18 ray tracing units, 144 XMX AI Engines, and 10GB GDDR6 memory with a 160-bit memory interface. And while this is less than the Arc B580, it is more memory bandwidth than the Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti and AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT, both of which struggled when it came to 1440p gaming in gaming benchmarks due to their constrained memory bandwidth.

What might be even more compelling for gamers right now, though, is the launch price of the two cards, with the Intel reference cards debuting at $249 (about £195/AU$385) and $219 (about £175/AU$340), respectively, though third-party cards from Acer, ASRock, Gunnir, and others will vary in price.

The Arc B580 will launch first on December 13, 2024, with the Arc B570 going on sale the following month on January 16, 2025.

Intel's new card might be the RTX 3060 Ti successor we've been missing

When it launched a couple of years back, the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti was a much more powerful card than it had a right to be, especially for it's initial launch price. It ended up being one of the most popular graphics cards of the entire Nvidia Ampere generation, and so when the RTX 4060 Ti launched last year, fans of the 3060 Ti had high hopes for its successor.

Unfortunately, the RTX 4060 Ti was hamstrung out the gate by a memory interface that made it effectively impossible to process textures at 1440p with any kind of speed or efficiency, even when opting for the variant with the larger 16GB memory pool.

For $399 (about £315/AU$615) at launch, the card was a disappointment, as this was way too much money to spend on what was effectively a 1080p graphics card, whereas the RTX 3060 Ti, with a memory interface twice as large as the RTX 4060 Ti's, could easily play games at 1440p with moderate to high settings at respectable framerates.

The only graphics cards to really make a splash in the sub-$400 segment over the past year and a half have been the Nvidia RTX 4060 and AMD RX 7600, and only really because of their pricing after the wild GPU price inflation on some of Nvidia and AMD's flagship cards. And neither of those cards could handle 1440p gaming.

With the new Intel Arc B580 and Arc B570, however, it's entirely possible that we might be able to see a new graphics card in the budget segment capable of tackling 1440p, the fastest-growing resolution for PC gaming, where their competitors at this price point cannot.

That's something that's been sorely missed these last couple of years, and while we'll have to test the cards ourselves before we can say for certain, I've been impressed with Intel's Xe2 cores in its Lunar Lake laptops, so I, for one, cannot wait to get my hands of the desktop version to take it for a spin.

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