Ray Tracing Gameplay Performance
A lot of the games we have in our lineup today actually run with and utilize ray tracing baked into the game natively, with ray-trace calculated lights. Those games include Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Doom: The Dark Ages, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Kingdom Come Deliverance II, and Star Wars Outlaws. However, there are some other games we used that can also flip on optional ray tracing options, and Star Wars Outlaws allows an RTX Direct Lighting option. Therefore, on this page, we’ll flip on these ray tracing options in the other games and see how well the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition can do. Because of the demand on performance, most of this testing is at 1080p, but we do include some 1440p comparisons as well in some games.
For comparison, we are using an ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 4060 OC Edition, a Radeon RX 7600 8GB reference card, and a SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 7600 XT (also an OC card) video card. The Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition is a 12GB video card.
Alan Wake 2
In Alan Wake 2, we are running at 1080p above using the “Low” Ray Tracing preset, so this is the lowest possible RT option in the game. None of the cards are playable at native resolution, but look at this, the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition is actually the fastest card, and is playable with Upscaling enabled at 60FPS! That’s just downright neat. The Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition is 30% faster than the GeForce RTX 4060 and 28% faster than the Radeon RX 7600 XT. It’s pretty crazy to see the GeForce RTX card getting beat in ray tracing so hard, but there you go.
Cyberpunk 2077
Of course, we have to try out ray tracing performance in Cyberpunk 2077. In the graph above, we are running at 1080p and the “Medium” ray tracing preset, so this isn’t the highest RT, it’s in the middle. Again, surprisingly, the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition does really well and provides 50FPS at native resolution, and is actually playable with Upscaling at 77FPS! The Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition beats the factory overclocked GeForce RTX 4060 by 11%, and beats the Radeon RX 7600 XT by 35%. Once again, very strong RT performance from the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition.
We also wanted to see what would happen at 1440p, but we did have to lower ray tracing to “Low” preset here, so this is the lowest ray tracing option in the game. The Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition does well once again, with the fastest performance. Even at 1440p, this game is playable with Low RT with Upscaling at 76FPS! The Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition is 38% faster than the GeForce RTX 4060, which is pretty amazing. We think the RTX 4060 is running into a VRAM limitation here with RT at 1440p also. The Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition is 24% faster than the Radeon RX 7600 XT.
Star Wars Outlaws
Star Wars Outlaws has an additional ray tracing option called NVIDIA RTX Direct Lighting. We enabled this feature on the “Low” preset quality at 1080p. The Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition pulls through yet again, and now matches performance with the GeForce RTX 4060, which is shocking to see, but there you go. In fact, with Upscaling, the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition is actually somewhat playable at 55FPS with this feature enabled. The Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition is 24% faster than the Radeon RX 7600 XT.
Discussion (8 replies)
Join Discussion →Man at that price point Intel has a real gem.
Imagine if you could double those up ... say in SLI or whatever ... for 4k gaming .... even at twice the price for the bump in performance you could provide better value than team green. And not much sacrifice on PCIe lanes because they're only x8 to begin with.
You mean like their new high end AI cards are designed to do. Dual B590's with 24 gig on one card for 48 gig with software that will support up to 4 of those cards if you have the lanes... for 8 GPU's. For 192gb of vram for your hungry LLM's.
I'd rather they develop their graphics cards to work toward scaling graphic resolution rather than compute. They can develop their processors to scale compute. Just because team green does it, doesn't mean everyone else (or anyone else, for that matter) should. Nip this silly nonsense in the bud.
Yea... but I don't think many of us want to buy a 360+ core CPU with what we would expect from a CPU. The great thing about GPU's is they are effectively small path limited programmable Cores. And you can pack a EFF TON of those into a GPU die. That's why CUDA is so amazing. But you wouldn't want to use it as a CPU.
Now you see companies coming out with RISC CPU's getting closer to parity with GPU's but we are still a long way off of that being programmatically useful for general purpose.
Guys and gals, this review put a real smile on my face. It is great to see this from Intel, and I hope to see more improvements in the next 24 months. We still need better Linux support and more consistent performance across games, but this card is currently a real option at that price.
Sadly modern graphics engines really don't work with SLI. They rely heavily on temporal upsampling, reusing data from the last frame to improve the current frame, and that makes it basically impossible to do interleaved rendering like the old Crossfire setups.
With such good best case results, I'd love to see a revisit with a 5600 or 12400 series CPU. 5800X or 12600K would be fun. Anything in that range. 10th or 11th gen would be really interesting too. Since games like Spidey and Miles Morales with high or maxed crowds, traffic, and RT reflections can really expose the overhead issues on Battlemage.
My 5600X3D could not fully utilize my Onix Odyssey B580 at times under those conditions. Swinging fast on crowded streets like Broadway being the worst case scenario. It drives the struggle bus on B450+3700X in those titles. It's playable until you try to use RT, then things get ugly. Which is a bummer because the card can handle it with enough CPU to drive it.
Overall though, it's a great card and a hell of lot of progress made from where my 750LE was at when I bought it.