A good two years ago, Intel launched the first Arc graphics cards and primarily covered the low-budget area. With the new Battlemage generation, the manufacturer is targeting 1440p.
Intel's attempts to steal at least a little market share from NVIDIA and AMD in the graphics card sector continue. After the previous models were primarily aimed at inexpensive 1080p gaming, Intel has set its sights on larger goals with the new Battlemage graphics cards Arc B570 and B580 and are now intended to enable inexpensive gaming in 1440p resolution.
The cards are very interesting in terms of price, as the Arc B570 is priced at $219 and the Arc B580 is priced at $249. The planned release dates are January 16th for the B570 and December 13th for the B580.
Intel has chosen the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 and the AMD Radeon RX 7600 as direct competition, whose performance should be exceeded by around 30 percent. Intel is also stepping up its upscaling technology with the new generation XeSS 2. Their performance is said to have been further improved and the frame rate of games improved by up to 80 percent. The new XeSS also supports DX11 and Vulkan and no longer just DX12. Furthermore, the XeSS 2 also has frame generation and a solution to reduce the resulting latency called XeSS-LL.
So again, doesn't sound like high-end performance at 1440p, but solid value for money as a base model for the resolution. It will be interesting to see whether and how well Intel can assert itself against the overwhelming competition from NVIDIA and the more moderately priced solutions from AMD.
The chances are not very good, after initial interest at the launch of the first Arc graphics cards, market shares quickly fell again, mainly due to severe driver problems, and are not worth mentioning yet.
