Intel has announced the company's all-new B-series gaming graphics cards. Replacing the previous-gen A-series, which included the excellent mid-range Arc A770, these new GPUs will be made available for desktop discrete cards, laptops, and gaming handhelds. Pushing Xe Super Sampling 2 (XeSS2), XMX AI acceleration, and solid performance, Intel is positioning the B-series as "best-in-class performance per Dollar". At launch, the more budget-friendly Intel Arc B580 and B570 will be available, offering 1440p ultra gaming experiences with ray tracing support and advanced frame generation.

Targeting 1440p with the new Intel Arc GPUs

Contrary to what display makers would lead us to believe, 1440p is the fastest-growing resolution and is often considered the sweet spot for gaming. Intel agrees as both B-series GPUs announced today are tailored to this resolution. Powering these new GPUs is the Intel Xe2 architecture. First-gen Xe was the first time Intel scaled the engine and since it was an early platform, the company had to build out the software stack. With Xe2, there's higher efficiency thanks to better utilization, improved work distribution, and less software overhead.

Let's talk about drive support, which Nvidia and AMD have nailed over the generations. Intel isn't too far behind as the company delivered more than 50 drivers since the Intel Arc A-series launched, supporting more than 120 new games at day 0, more than doubling the overall game coverage by Intel's GPU drivers. This led to a completely different experience using an Intel Arc GPU today than a few years ago. Xe2 has been developed to reduce latency, eliminate stalls, and improve the handshake between software and hardware.

Looking at what makes Xe2 tick, the render slice consists of native SIMD16 ALUs with 4-deep XMX. Inside the second-gen Xe core are 8 512-bit vector engines, 8 2048-bit XMX engines, 64b atomic ops support, and 256KB shared cache. According to released marketing slides, Intel has achieved significant performance per core improvements over previous GPUs. The ray tracing unit alone has three traversal pipelines, 18 box intersections, and two triangle intersections. All this should result in considerably better ray tracing performance in more demanding games.

Then there's three times vertex fetch throughput and mesh shading performance, more caching, and other improvements, resulting in quite the advancement. Compared to Intel's older GPUs, we're looking at an improvement of 70% in performance per core and 50% in performance per watt. Intel's XeSS Frame Generation (XeSS-FG) and XeSS Super Resolution (XeSS-SR) will also make the launch. Finally, we've got Xe Low Latency (XeLL) for reducing gaming latency. Think of these as Intel's DLSS 3 Frame Generation and Reflex. Bring everything together and you could have a winning formula for 1440p gaming on a budget.

How much will Intel's new Battlemage GPUs cost?

Intel is launching two GPUs, the Arc B580 and Arc B570. No word yet on the 700-series but I can't imagine Intel would leave additional performance on the table when these 500-series cards already offer 1440p experiences. The Intel Arc B580 will cost $249 and launch on December 13, 2024. The more affordable Intel Arc B570 will follow on January 16, 2025, for just $219.

Compared to the competition, Intel is offering more VRAM and performance than the likes of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 and AMD Radeon RX 7600. Things certainly look like they could be heating up and this could be the win that Intel so desperately requires after the disastrous launch of the Core Ultra 200 series. We'll put both of these GPUs to the test, so remain tuned for our reviews!