Introduction

Intel today launched the second graphics card in its Arc Battlemage series, the Arc B570, and we have with us the ASRock Arc B570 Challenger OC, the company's value custom-design based on it. Intel's 2024 yearend launch of the B580 saw unexpected success, and was received well by reviewers and gamers alike. At a disruptive starting price of $250, the B580 offered much better value than the segment leader GeForce RTX 4060, consistently dominating it in all game genres. It also has a powerful ray tracing hardware feature-set. Besides the silicon engineering, the B580 is well-rounded by a surprisingly mature software backbone, and an agile driver release cycle. Now, Intel plans to repeat its success at an even more competitive price point with the new Arc B570.



The Intel Arc B570 is coming in at a feisty starting price of just $220, with custom design boards such as the ASRock B570 Challenger OC going for $230. This separates it from the B580 custom designs by around $20-40. The B570 is designed to have a lower cost than the B580, and is better positioned to eat NVIDIA's lunch around the $200-mark, or even below. If you recall, NVIDIA did not launch a successor to the RTX 3050 in the RTX 40-series Ada generation, which means this market segment is practically undefended by the green team. AMD's approach has been equally clumsy, there is nothing in its product stack below the RX 7600 in its current generation, and there exists a vast performance gap between the RX 7600, or older generation RX 6600 series, and the "mid-range" RX 6500 XT, a GPU that performs in the league of iGPUs. The task for Intel Graphics is hence cut out. If it is able to maintain the levels of cost-performance it did with the B580, the B570 will breathe life into the low-cost gaming PC segment.

The Arc B570 is powered by the new Xe2 Battlemage graphics architecture. Intel took learned lessons from its Xe Alchemist generation, and tried to address them at a hardware level with Xe2. These include an up to 70% generational increase in SIMD performance from its Xe cores, and a 50% gain in performance per watt, due in part to the switch to TSMC 5 nm EUV process. The company also worked intensely on the ray tracing hardware of this architecture, and claims 50-100% gains in specific areas of the ray tracing workload, reducing the cost of enabling ray tracing. Intel is also introducing XeSS 2, the second generation of its in-house performance enhancements, which introduces XeFG (Xe Frame Generation), and XeLL (Xe Low Latency), working alongside the Super Resolution to unlock performance and image quality of GPUs from higher segments, as well as give the B570 longevity and market relevance for years.

The Arc B570 is based on the same 5 nm BMG-G21 silicon as the B580, but is further cut down. It has 18 Xe cores compared to the 20 on the B580, which work out to 112 execution units, or 2,240 unified shaders. You also get 18 ray tracing units, and 144 XMX cores, 144 TMUs, and 60 ROPs. The memory size is down to 10 GB from the 12 GB on the B580, and the memory bus width is lowered to 160-bit compared to the 192-bit of the B580. Intel is using 19 Gbps GDDR6 memory speeds, and so this results in 380 GB/s of memory bandwidth. This is still a superior memory sub-system to the RTX 4060 and RX 7600, which feature 8 GB of memory across narrower 128-bit memory interfaces. The display and media acceleration capabilities of the Arc B570 are carried over from the B580—you get DisplayPort up to UHBR13.5 and HDMI 2.1 handling I/O, and dual media acceleration engines capable of AV1 and HEVC encode and decode.

The ASRock Arc B570 Challenger OC is the company's value custom-design based on this GPU, it features a simple aluminium fin-stack heatsink that's ventilated by a pair of large fans that offer idle fan-stop. There's also a well-designed metal 3-D backplate. The PCB underneath is two-thirds the length of the card, and so airflow from the second fan goes through the heatsink and is vented from large cutouts in the backplate. The card draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. ASRock is pricing the card at a $10 premium over the Intel baseline price, attempting to justify it with a small factory overclock of 2.60 GHz engine clock compared to 2.50 GHz Intel reference, while leaving the memory untouched at 19 Gbps.