Intel Arc B570 review: a budget GPU that's too good to be true?
Excellent hardware, but performance issues in combination with less powerful CPUs.
When all's said and done, the B570 is a robust choice, delivering around 85-90 percent of the B580's performance in the vast majority of games that we tested, both with RT enabled and disabled. That tends to put it beyond the likes of the RTX 4060 and RX 7600, its two closest category rivals, though the significantly more expensive RTX 4060 Ti 8GB remains out of reach.
Its 10GB of VRAM is sufficient in all but one game, A Plague Tale: Requiem, where our typical settings see its performance drop off - no problem there really, just lower the texture setting. Otherwise though, 10GB feels about right for a graphics card with this level of compute.
We typically end our graphics card reviews with a note on price versus performance at various resolutions, with the usual caveat that the graphics card market is a bit mad at the moment and it's often extremely difficult - or actually impossible - to purchase a GPU at the MSRP promised by the likes of Intel, AMD or Nvidia or their board partners.
Unfortunately, even months post-launch, actually buying a B570 for a reasonable price can be quite a challenge, depending on where you are in the world. In the UK, things aren't too bad, with an asking price of £219 for a handsome blue B570 Sparkle that outperforms similarly-priced Nvidia and AMD competition. In the US though, the cheapest B570 available is the same card at $325 - so far above the MSRP as to be not worth recommending even for Intel super-fans.
For that reason, we'll dispense with the usual value charts and instead focus on where this graphics card actually makes sense: for owners of recent, PCIe 4.0 capable CPUs and motherboards that are able to take advantage of the card's perks - great 1080p and 1440p performance versus the AMD and Intel competition, a reasonable 10GB VRAM allocation and access to XeSS.
Unfortunately, those advantages are nullified somewhat by the driver overhead issues that sap performance on lower-end CPUs, especially those without PCIe 4.0 and/or ReBAR support. If you are on an older system - say, a non-X3D Ryzen from the 5000 generation or earlier, or a mid-range Intel Core CPU before 12th-gen - then the RTX 3060, the RTX 4060 or RX 7600 make more sense in this price segment by delivering more reliable performance across a range of CPUs.
It'll be fascinating to see how Nvidia and AMD's upcoming entry-level offerings compare against Arc in the months to come, as every mainstream GPU seems to have at least one major drawback right now. That's a prospect that should have Intel and AMD in particular redoubling their efforts to disrupt the status quo, and even market leader Nvidia ought to be doing better in this underserved segment.
Intel Arc B570 Analysis
- Introduction
- RT benchmarks: Alan Wake 2, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
- RT benchmarks: Dying Light 2, F1 24, Hitman: World of Assassination
- RT benchmarks: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, A Plague Tale: Requiem
- Game benchmarks: Alan Wake 2, Black Myth: Wukong
- Game benchmarks: F1 24, Forza Horizon 5, Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2
- Game benchmarks: Hitman: World of Assassination, A Plague Tale: Requiem
- Driver overhead testing: does Arc underperform with older CPUs?
- Conclusions, value and recommendations [This Page]