More evidence is adding up to the new Intel Arc B580 being a fast graphics card for its modest $249 price, as a new gaming benchmark leak has shown it being not only faster than the GeForce RTX 4060, but also quicker than the $399 RTX 4060 Ti. The benchmark in question is 3DMark Time Spy, which has been used for years as a general gauge of gaming performance.
If this leak is genuine, then it looks as though Intel has the best graphics card for budget gamers under its belt, but there are a few caveats to point out. Firstly, Time Spy is an old benchmark that only tests rasterization performance, giving no indication of ray tracing performance, which may well be better on the Nvidia GPUs. Secondly, of course, this is a leak, and as such needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
This latest Intel Arc B580 benchmark leak comes from the Chiphell forums, where a user called GPX-John posted a screenshot with a link to a now-deleted post on coolaler.com. According to the screenshot, the Intel Arc B580 GPU was tested with an Intel Core i9 14900KF CPU (basically the same as the Core i9 14900K, but with the integrated GPU disabled), and it then clocked up an overall 3DMark Time Spy result of 15,551, with a graphics score of 14,719.
Comparatively, the best result from the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti using this CPU is 15,488, with a graphics score of 14,604, and that’s with the CPU overclocked to 6.2GHz. In fact, even if you swap the 14900KF for the more common 14900K in the leaderboard, the purported Arc B580 is only beaten by two results with the RTX 4060 Ti, and both of them were achieved with an overclocked CPU.
To add another comparison to the mix, the top result for the 14900K with a standard GeForce RTX 4060 is a much lower 12,451. If this result is right, then Intel clearly has a very powerful budget GPU waiting in the wings. In terms of shader power, and running normal games without ray tracing, this $249 GPU looks as though it can potentially beat a $399 Nvidia GPU.
Of course, this situation will be interrupted as soon as the Nvidia RTX 5000 series is unleashed, but if Nvidia is planning to partner the RTX 5060 Ti with 8GB of VRAM, and with only a small bump in performance, as we saw when the RTX 3060 Ti was superseded by the RTX 4060 Ti, then this 12GB Arc B580 GPU could well be a better buy.
The other factors, of course, are ray tracing, which is a current unknown for Arc B580 performance, and where Nvidia is the current king, as well as compatibility. As we found in our Intel Arc A770 review, the last generation of Intel gaming GPUs had a lot of game support issues, but if these are going to be resolved with the Battlemage lineup, then it looks as though budget gaming GPUs are about to get a lot more interesting.
If you want to see what we think Nvidia will be unveiling at CES 2025 in January, check out our guide to the RTX 5090, as well as our RTX 5080 guide, where we share everything we know so far about the new GPUs.