Sparkle Arc B580 Titan OC Review 7

Sparkle Arc B580 Titan OC Review

Architecture »

Introduction

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We have with us the Sparkle Arc B580 Titan OC graphics card, powered by the new B580 Battlemage GPU that's been making waves since its reveal earlier this month. Sparkle is a fairly new entrant to the Intel Arc graphics card ecosystem, but has been around for decades, notably as a former NVIDIA GeForce board partner. Now they are owned by TUL—the parent company of PowerColor. The Titan OC is the company's premium custom-design based on the B580, and pairs the GPU with a 31.5 cm-long triple-fan cooling solution that's a little over two slots thick. The Arc B580 marks Intel's second generation of the Xe gaming graphics architecture as discrete GPUs. These are modern, fulfill the DirectX 12 Ultimate API standards, and include a wide range of gaming experience improvements within the XeSS 2 feature suite.



Xe2 Battlemage succeeds the original Xe Alchemist. It debuted earlier this year as the architecture driving the iGPU of Intel's Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake mobile processors, although that variant was a "lite" implementation of Xe2. On the Arc B580, you can expect a more complete set of the Xe2 Battlemage IP, with the GPU being geared for performance-segment gaming. The B580 logically succeeds the Arc A580, but presents a massive generational performance step-up. Intel claims (and we're confirmed in our review of the reference design), that the B580 outperforms every GPU from the Alchemist generation, including the top A770, and since the A770 was marketed as a 1440p-class GPU, this use case carries on for the B580.

In all, Intel claims a 70% gain in the SIMD performance of its 2nd Gen Xe cores over Alchemist, and a 50% gain in performance-per-watt, due in part to the new TSMC 5 nm EUV foundry node these chips are being built on. This is thanks to the significant IPC gain of the 2nd Gen Xe core, a new Ray Tracing Unit with anywhere between 50% to 100% generational gains in performance, a large 18 MB on-die last-level cache, and a faster memory sub-system than the A580, besides double the memory size, at 12 GB.

The B580 is being pitted by Intel against the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060. If you recall, the previous generation flagship parts, the A770 and A750, were compared by Intel to the RTX 3060, and the A580 was awkwardly positioned against the RTX 3050. In this sense, Intel has made a bigger generational leap in performance than NVIDIA, and we can only hope that Intel scales out the Xe2 architecture for even larger GPUs.

The Arc B580 is based on the 5 nm BMG-G21 silicon, and features 20 Xe cores, or 128 execution units, worth 2,560 unified shaders. There are also 20 Ray Tracing Units, and 160 XMX units, which accelerate AI. This is backed by a solid raster graphics backend, consisting of 80 ROPs, and 160 TMUs. The chip gets 12 GB of 19 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit wide memory bus, which is both 50% larger and faster than the memory implementation of the RTX 4060 and the AMD Radeon RX 7600.

Perhaps the biggest aspect of the Arc B580 is its starting price of $250, which undercuts the RTX 4060 and the RX 7600 XT by at least $50. The Sparkle Arc B580 Titan OC looks like it's from a segment above, and yet, is being offered at just a $20 premium over this. The card is 31.5 cm in length and comes with a factory overclocked speed of 2740 MHz, compared to the 2670 MHz reference speed. It also comes with a slight increase in power limits to 200 W, from 190 W reference.

Intel Arc B580 Market Segment Analysis
 PriceCoresROPsCore
Clock
Boost
Clock
Memory
Clock
GPUTransistorsMemory
RX 6500 XT$1401024322685 MHz2825 MHz2248 MHzNavi 245400M4 GB, GDDR6, 64-bit
Arc A580$1803072961700 MHzN/A2000 MHzACM-G1021700M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3050$1652560321552 MHz1777 MHz1750 MHzGA10612000M8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
Arc A750$22035841122050 MHzN/A2000 MHzACM-G1021700M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6600 XT$2052048642359 MHz2589 MHz2000 MHzNavi 2311060M8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RTX 3060$2203584481320 MHz1777 MHz1875 MHzGA10612000M12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RX 7600$2502048642250 MHz2625 MHz2250 MHzNavi 3313300M8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RX 7600 XT$3102048642470 MHz2755 MHz2250 MHzNavi 3313300M16 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RTX 4060$2853072481830 MHz2460 MHz2125 MHzAD10718900M8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
Arc A770$25040961282100 MHzN/A2187 MHzACM-G1021700M16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Arc B580$2502560802670 MHzN/A2375 MHzBMG-G2119600M12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
Sparkle Arc B580 Titan OC$2702560802740 MHzN/A2375 MHzBMG-G2119600M12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 3060 Ti$3004864801410 MHz1665 MHz1750 MHzGA10417400M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 4060 Ti$3804352482310 MHz2535 MHz2250 MHzAD10622900M8 GB, GDDR6, 128-bit
RX 6700 XT$350
2560642424 MHz2581 MHz2000 MHzNavi 2217200M12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 3070$3205888961500 MHz1725 MHz1750 MHzGA10417400M8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3070 Ti$3706144961575 MHz1770 MHz1188 MHzGA10417400M8 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RX 6800$3403840961815 MHz2105 MHz2000 MHzNavi 2126800M16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 7700 XT$3703456962171 MHz2544 MHz2250 MHzNavi 3226500M12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RX 6800 XT$40046081282015 MHz2250 MHz2000 MHzNavi 2126800M16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
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