Introduction

The ASRock Arc B580 Steel Legend is the company's premium custom design take on Intel's newest performance segment GPU, the B580 Battlemage. The Steel Legend brand represents a balance of rugged industrial build quality, and cost. In ASRock's stack of graphics cards and motherboards, it's positioned a notch below the Phantom Gaming series, but a notch above Challenger. The company is also launching the Arc B580 Challenger today. The Arc B580 heralds Intel's second generation of Xe branded discrete gaming GPUs. These are contemporary, meet DirectX 12 Ultimate API requirements, and come with a comprehensive set of gaming experience enhancements under the XeSS 2 feature suite.



The new Xe2 Battlemage graphics architecture debuted with the iGPU solution of Intel's Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake mobile processor, but a more specialized version of this launches today with the B580, and its value sibling, the B570. The B580 logically follows the A580, a barely 1080p-capable graphics card. However, the B580 offers a significant performance improvement. It boasts a 70% increase in SIMD performance due to its architecture. Additionally, the 5 nm process contributes to a 50% boost in performance-per-watt. As a result, the B580 outperforms all models in the Arc A-series Alchemist generation, including the flagship A770.

At its starting price of $250, the B580 is positioned more logically against the RTX 4060 and AMD's Radeon RX 7600 and RX 7600 XT, than the awkward placement the A580 had, against the RTX 3050. Battlemage promises not just a generational gain in raster 3D performance, but the company worked to significantly boost the ray tracing units, adding anywhere between 50% to 100% gains in performance for the various ray tracing workloads. This, along with XeSS 2, reduces the performance cost of ray tracing.

XeSS 2 is a collection of three features, XeSS Super Resolution (XeSS SR), which is the original XeSS from the Arc A-series; the new XeSS Frame Generation (XeSS FG), which is a new AI-based frame rate doubling technology; and Xe Low Latency (XeLL), a feature that counteracts the system latency imposed by ray tracing, XeSS SR, and XeSS FG. XeLL can work as a standalone feature, too. Intel also introduced driver-based latency reduction, which works on any game without Xe-specific optimization.

The Arc B580 is based on the 5 nm BMG-G21 silicon, and comes with 20 Xe2 cores, worth 128 execution units, or 2,560 unified shaders. There are also 160 XMX cores, 20 Ray Tracing Units, and a solid raster 3D machinery consisting of 80 ROPs, and 160 TMUs. The memory sub-system features a large 18 MB last-level cache on the GPU, and 12 GB of 19 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit memory interface, for 50% more memory bandwidth than both the RTX 4060 and the RX 7600 XT. The GPU also comes with two sets of hardware video encoders and decoders, and a modern display I/O, including DisplayPort 2.1 UHBR 13.5, which should draw some attention from creative professionals.

The ASRock B580 Steel Legend looks like it's from a segment above. It's currently listed for $270 on Newegg, which is a $20 increase over the Intel reference card price point. You're getting a large triple-slot cooling solution, and a PCB with two 8-pin power connectors instead of one. The B580 comes with a default board power limit of 190 W, and so although the reference-design card comes with just one connector, the second one could come handy with overclocking, and to contain any spikes in power draw.

Xe2 Battlemage Architecture

The Arc B580 debuts Intel's second discrete gaming GPU architecture, codenamed Xe2 "Battlemage." A variant of Xe2 is used in the integrated graphics solution of Intel's Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" mobile processors, the one today is its fully-fledged discrete gaming GPU version, with all hardware components enabled. The Arc B580 is a mid-range model based on the BMG-G21 silicon. The B580 likely does not max-out the silicon, since it is meant to succeed the mid-range A580 "Alchemist." We asked, but Intel would not comment on future products. The BMG-G21 is built on the TSMC N5 (5 nm EUV) foundry node, and packs 19.6 billion transistors across a 272 mm² monolithic die. The 5 nm node is contemporary, given that both NVIDIA "Ada" and AMD RDNA 3 gaming GPUs use it.

The BMG-G21 GPU features a PCI-Express 4.0 x8 host interface on the Arc B580 and B570. It is configured with a 192-bit GDDR6 memory bus on the B580, and a 160-bit bus on the B570. The GPU is organized in a very similar manner to modern GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD—a Global Dispatch processor distributes work among the five Render Slices, which talk to each other over the GPU's fabric and memory sub-system. The GPU's internal last-level cache is 18 MB in size. Besides the five Render Slices, there is the Media Engine, consisting of two MFX multi-format x-coders (encoders/decoders); there are two sets of hardware encoders and decoders. Then there's the GDDR6 memory controller and the Display Engine, with four display interfaces.


Intel is claiming a 70% generational increase in performance per Xe Core, the indivisible number-crunching subunit of the GPU; and a 50% generational performance-per-watt increase. The above graphs illustrate the contribution of the individual sub-systems of the Xe2 Battlemage architecture toward these improvements; and how this plays out in a frametime analysis example of a real-world use case.


The Render Slice diagram (above) highlights the biggest chunk of the generational performance increase by Intel. It's thanks to increased IPC from the Xe Core, a more specialized and capable Ray Tracing Unit, a 300% faster Geometry engine, faster Sampler, 50% increase in HiZ, Z, stencil caches, and increases in performance of the pixel backends. Intel's engineering goal has been to reduce latency wherever it can, and reduce software (CPU) overhead as much as it can. The new 2nd Gen Xe Core features eight 512-bit vector engines, with SIMD16-native ALUs, and many more data formats. Rather than two sets of FP and INT units per vector engine, there is just one set of each per vector engine in Xe2, with larger numbers of ALUs.


Intel introduced its second gen Ray Tracing Unit, with massive generational improvements in performance and capability. It introduces a third Traversal Pipeline, which yields a 50% increase in box intersection performance. A second triangle intersection unit has been added to double the performance of triangle intersections. The BVH cache has doubled in size to 16 KB.

XeSS 2, Frame Generation, and Low Latency

Intel has codified the original XeSS as XeSS Super Resolution (XeSS-SR), as that's what it originally was—a performance enhancement that relies on super-resolution technology. The XeSS-SR SDK gets a new compute dispatcher backend for popular APIs—DirectX 11, DirectX 12, and Vulkan. There are two XeSS-SR models, the regular one, and a XeSS-SR Lite model for GPUs that lack XMX matrix acceleration capability.

XeSS 2 isn't a single technology, or an improvement over XeSS-SR, but a collection of three technologies—the existing XeSS-SR, which deals with performance; the new XeSS Frame Generation (XeSS-FG) technology, which nearly doubles frame rates based on intelligent frame doubling; and the new Xe Low Latency (XeLL) technology, which works to reduce the latency cost of SR and FG, but is something that can be used as a standalone whole-system latency technology, too.


XeSS-FG can either be implemented at native resolution, or in conjunction with XeSS-SR, where it is located right after the XeSS-SR step in the rendering queue. It relies on motion vectors, depth data, temporal frame data, and optical flow reprojection, to create interpolated frames that are then interleaved with the output frames, to effectively double the framerate. The interpolated image is then passed along to the next stage, where the HUD/UI is added at native resolution, and pushed to the frame buffer for output.


The SR + FG passes contribute to frame latency, and so, just as NVIDIA uses Reflex to counteract this latency, Intel innovated XeLL. The technology intelligently compacts the rendering queue to reduce the time it takes for an input to register as motion on-screen. XeLL remains enabled in all workloads the use XeSS-FG, but it can be used as a standalone feature, too. There's also an implicit driver-based low-latency mode that does this without a game having an explicit XeSS 2 or XeLL implementation.


Intel has updated its software package significantly. The new "Intel Graphics Software" replaces the "Arc Control" utility, and gives you a cleaner user interface. There are many new settings related to the display, including display scaling model/method/quantization range; 3D graphics settings, including a driver-based FPS limiter, the driver-based low-latency mode; and the exhaustive new Performance and Overclocking controls, which include the ability to set frequency offsets, tinker with the V/F curve, power limits, and GPU and memory clocks. It also integrates Intel's PresentMon metrics.

Packaging

The Card

ASRock's card comes with a nice-looking white color theme. The main colors are various shades of white and gray—I like. The card uses a short PCB, which allows some airflow through the card for better cooling performance. On the back you get a metal backplate, which integrates nicely with the rest of the design.


Dimensions of the card are 30.0 x 13.5 cm, and it weighs 951 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 50 mm.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 2.1 and one HDMI 2.1a. On the Intel reference card one port is marked with a black outline, but not on this card. That port supports higher bitrates (UHBR13.5), i.e. 4K up to 360 Hz, while the other two ports support up to 240 Hz, so I guess you have to test them to find the right one (if you have a monitor that requires such high transfer rates).

In terms of codecs, you get full support for H.264, H.265, VP9 and AV1, both encode and decode. Worth highlighting is HEVC 4:2:2 10-bit encoding and decoding, which is a unique capability, and AV1 Screen Content encoding, which improves the quality of text in movies—fantastic for screen recordings or screen sharing.


The card uses two 8-pin connectors, plus PCIe slot power, allowing a maximum power draw of 375 W. Since the card's power limit is much power (200 W), there's only minimal benefit from this dual connector design.


ASRock's Steel Legend supports adjustable RGB lighting on the three fans and the logo.


Using this header, you may feed RGB from an external source, so that the graphics card displays the same RGB effects as your motherboard, for example.


If you prefer, the lighting can be turned off easily with this switch—no software required.

Teardown

The main cooler uses four heatpipes and provides cooling for the GPU, memory and VRM circuitry.


On the back, you'll find a metal backplate with a big cutout to improve airflow.