The Intel Arc B580 is considered the cheapest modern GPU on the market today, with Tom’s Hardware considering it the $249 GPU champion. However, several reviewers discovered that the budget GPU performs poorly on older processors. Intel has acknowledged the issue and will investigate it.
A moderator on the Intel Community forum started an Intel Arc Graphics and CPU Overhead thread, saying, “Thank you for your patience. We are aware of reports of performance sensitivity in some games when paired with older generation processors. We have increased our platform coverage to include more configurations in our validation process, and we are continuing to investigate optimizations.”
Reviewers first noticed the issue in early January, when they tested the Intel Arc B580 on older and newer CPUs. For example, Hardware Unboxed ran some gaming benchmarks with the GPU using an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and a Ryzen 5 2600. It also used an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 as a control, and these are its results.
The Intel Arc B580 performs decently enough when paired with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, with the RTX 4060 outperforming it by around 10% on average. However, the performance gap between the two entry-level desktop GPUs widens when paired with the much older Ryzen 5 2600. The RTX 4060 now gets a 22% advantage over the Intel graphics card, with some games returning an unplayable 30 FPS or lower. Note that this doesn’t include 1% low numbers, which are much worse for the B580.
Hopefully, Intel can find a fix for this issue sooner rather than later, mainly as it affects the core market of the Intel Arc B580 — budget gamers. You might think that buying the B580 to replace your old GTX 1060, which was still the most popular GPU on Steam as late as 2022, will finally let you play some newer games. But you might be disappointed with this overhead issue, as it will preclude you from playing some game titles without upgrading your CPU.
This might not be too big of a problem if you already have an AM4 motherboard, especially as AMD is still releasing new chips for this socket in 2025. But if you have an AM3+ or older motherboard (or older Intel chips), you’ll likely need to spend on a new CPU and motherboard, increasing the cost of upgrading your system to play the latest titles. And with tariffs jacking up prices everywhere, this might mean you cannot afford to play newer games at all.
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