Intel is a newcomer to the discrete GPU game. The Arc B570 is a Battlemage graphics card and was released late 2024, taking on AMD and Nvidia in the low-end segment. This GPU offers butter-smooth 1080p gaming and can even handle 1440p gaming with settings conservatively configured. What makes the B570 particularly noteworthy is its impressive support for AV1 transcoding, following the first-gen A series cards. This makes the GPU great for gaming and transcoding through Jellyfin.

Intel's Arc B570 is a solid GPU

Play all the latest games at 1440p

Intel's Arc B570 is simply a good gaming GPU. This thing isn't designed to take on the best from AMD and Nvidia, but it's a great option for budget-conscious gamers who don't enjoy spending $500 or more on a single component. Running the Intel Arc B570 on a test bench with an AMD Ryzen 7 9700X CPU, 32 GB of DDR5-6400 RAM, and a Gigabyte X670E Aorus Master motherboard with Windows 11, I was able to achieve some solid results that put the card right up there with the RTX 4060.

The Intel Arc B570 performed well in a variety of game tests. 1080p is solid, but 1440p is just as smooth, so long as you don't mind turning a setting or two down. Intel even has its own version of DLSS with XeSS to improve performance further, especially with future driver updates. I even paired the $219 Intel Arc B570 on my 49-inch gaming super ultrawide. It didn't go as poorly as you may have assumed. What does this mean for transcoding through Jellyfin?

The Intel B570 shouldn't have any trouble transcoding multiple 1080p or even 4K streams.

And it's great for transcoding

AV1, affordable, and cool

AV1 is a next-gen video codec, fully supported by Intel Battlemage GPUs. This is great for transcoding content through Jellyfin since AV1 offers better compression than H.264 and HEVC, resulting in better image quality and lower overheads on the system. Although Intel was rather new to the discrete game compared to AMD and Nvidia, the company's Arc GPUs were among the first to fully support accelerated AV1 hardware encoding.

What makes this even better is that Intel doesn't charge a premium to take advantage of AV1, as the Intel Arc B570 is one of the most affordable modern graphics cards you can buy. That's already brilliant news for gaming, but it's even more vital for home labs and self-hosting, as the goal is to save as much money as possible. The B570 from Intel facilitates precisely that. AV1 transcoding within Jellyfin is rapid, too, allowing you to enjoy streaming with less downtime.

If you're currently using the CPU to handle everything, you're likely encountering some buffering if it's bogged down with other scheduled tasks or simply not up to snuff when it comes to brute-forcing a transcode workload through your CPU. Adding the Intel Arc B570 to the mix improves overall performance, allows your CPU to be freed up for other computing tasks, and makes everything quicker if the chip is unable to handle transcoding alone.

Transcoding on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X inside my Jellyfin test bench is painless, largely thanks to the massive overhead available with this chip. That said, it still requires considerable computing, and although the CPU can handle a few streams without issue, we're seeing high CPU usage and a lot of heat generated. Swapping in the B570, installing necessary media drivers from Intel, and passing it through to the Jellyfin container, the GPU handles transcoding seriously well.

It's cooler, more efficient, and is tailored to handling AV1 transcoding, making it the vastly superior option for working with mismatched content and clients. If you're seeking a cheap way to add dedicated transcoding support to your Jellyfin platform, this is one of the best GPUs to buy. All that was needed to be done within Jellyfin was for VAAPI to be enabled, and everything started working.