When Intel's Arc B580 unveiled the company's new Battlemage architecture over a month ago, it was met with glowing reviews, universally hailed as an affordable 1440p ray tracing GPU. For only $250 (if you could get it at that price), it was comfortable beating the likes of RTX 4060 in almost all titles. Soon after, however, reports started coming in that the Arc B580 had a serious performance overhead issue in the very segment it was targeting.

When switching from high-end CPUs to older or budget CPUs, the Arc B580 saw a greater dip in performance compared to the competition. This issue was especially problematic at 1080p, the resolution that most budget gamers are likely to use even today. Naturally, this affects the appeal of Intel's latest GPUs for budget gamers, as anyone with higher-end CPUs is unlikely to pair them with the Arc B580.

Arc B580 is mighty impressive, but only with modern CPUs

What's a budget gamer gotta do?

It all began when reviewers noticed a serious performance drop on the Arc B580 when swapping, say, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D on the test bench for a Ryzen 5 5600 or Core i5-9600K. Switching to a relatively weaker CPU will obviously show slightly lower framerates, which was evident on competing cards like the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 as well, but the degree of performance drop on the Arc B580 was way higher.

Analysis by Hardware Unboxed shows that while the Arc B580 maintains a healthy 14% lead over the pricier RTX 4060 at 1440p, when both are paired with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D (the fastest gaming CPU in the world), it's only 4% faster than the RTX 4060 when paired with the weaker Ryzen 5 5600. This is because the RTX 4060 exhibited no performance drop at all, whereas the Battlemage GPU dropped by around 9%.

The Arc B580 fares much worse at 1080p, the preferred resolution for over 55% of users, as it is around 14% slower than the RTX 4060 when paired with the Ryzen 5 5600. Users that currently have even older processors, such as the Ryzen 5 3600 or mid-range 9th and 10th Gen Intel Core CPUs, will see even lower performance. The issue becomes more pronounced in CPU-limited titles, and if you're a fan of those, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Intel's more affordable Arc B570 makes even less sense than the B580 since it's a weaker card and performs noticeably worse than its older sibling with budget CPUs. So, if you've been excited about buying one of the latest Battlemage GPUs for your budget gaming rig, think twice if you have anything slower than the Ryzen 5 7600 or Core i5-13600K on your build.

It could force a CPU upgrade sooner than the competition

Almost defeats the whole purpose

Intel's strong showing with the Arc Battlemage cards is undoubtedly a huge win for the company and introduces much-needed competition in the desktop GPU space. However, as it stands, the Arc B580 (or B570) isn't particularly suitable for budget gamers — users who are most likely to consider the affordable entrants. Unless you're fine with getting much less for your money in a price-sensitive segment, you're simply better off going with the RTX 4060 or RX 7600.

Besides the raw performance numbers, another aspect to consider is how soon the Arc B580 will force you to upgrade your CPU to something newer, compared to the competition. The slightly more expensive RTX 4060 — with better performance, upscaling tech, and ray tracing — might allow you to squeeze a year or two extra from your aging CPU, but with the Arc B580, you're already starting at a disadvantage.

Even AMD's RX 7600, which is priced identically to the Arc B580 (if the Intel GPU is in stock, that is), is noticeably faster at 1080p. The whole point of Intel pricing the Arc B580 aggressively was to disrupt the budget GPU market, but its unfortunate performance overhead with budget CPUs is a major blow to its value proposition.

The issue isn't with PCIe bandwidth or ReBAR

If only it were as simple

Many users believe that the performance overhead of the new Arc GPUs is due to the older PCIe generation support on CPUs like the Core i5-9600K or Ryzen 5 2600 (PCIe Gen3). Others attribute it to the lack of ReBAR (Resizable BAR) support on CPUs older than Intel's 10th Gen Core or AMD's Ryzen 3000 processors.

Unfortunately, the lower PCIe bandwidth isn't nearly enough to account for the performance drop seen on Intel GPUs compared to the competition. As for ReBAR support, Hardware Unboxed backported the feature on older CPUs before testing, so the issue isn't explained by the lack of official ReBAR support either.

Many users are waiting for Intel to release driver updates to address the concerns, but some experts believe that this could be a deeper architectural design issue that mere driver updates won't be able to solve, at least not fully. If that is indeed the case, Intel could struggle to put a dent in the market share of Nvidia and AMD, not just with its current Battlemage offerings, but also with future SKUs.

Here's hoping Intel finds a fix soon

The desktop GPU market sorely needed exciting budget cards like the Arc B580 and B570, but the associated performance overhead with older budget CPUs has put a spanner in the works. Nvidia and AMD offerings don't exhibit similar problems, and Intel's slightly better value isn't enough to mask this issue.

Add to that the fact that it's still hard to find the Arc B580 in stock, and the better upscaling and ray tracing available on the RTX 4060 (plus the new DLSS 4 benefits), and it's hard to make a case for the Arc GPUs for budget gamers. Intel is aware of the problem and might release a fix soon, but it's anyone's guess to what extent it will be able to eliminate the issue.