Intel Arc B570 review featuring the ASRock Challenger OC: A decent budget option with a few deep cuts

For 2025 (as well as the Arc B580 review), we've upgraded our GPU test PC and modernized our gaming test suite. The new system has an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor, the fastest current CPU for gaming purposes. We did test the B580 on our old 13900K test bed as well, and most of the results were basically the same as the 9800X3D — meaning the GPU speed is the limiting factor in most games.

We're running Windows 11 24H2, with the latest drivers at the time of testing. We used AMD's 24.12.1 drivers, Nvidia's 566.36 drivers, and Intel's preview 6256 drivers for the B570. We also retested the B580 with the publicly available 6256 drivers, while the Arc A770 used the 6319 drivers.

Note that these changes mean all the results from our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, while still valid for when they were run, need to be refreshed. We'll be working on a revised GPU hierarchy in the coming weeks, but it will be a bit before that's fully ready — we want at least all the current generation cards to be included, and it's no secret that both Nvidia Blackwell RTX 50-series GPUs and AMD RX 9000-series RDNA 4 GPUs are incoming.

Our PC is hooked up to a Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 32, one of the best gaming monitors around, allowing us to potentially experience some of the higher frame rates that might be available on the fastest GPUs. Most games can't get anywhere close to the 240 Hz limit of the monitor, especially not with budget to midrange hardware like the Arc B570 and its direct competition.

The new (revised since B580) GPU test suite consists of 22 games. We dropped Call of Duty Black Ops 6 from the suite due to frequent changes and some other oddities, and we're still looking at other potential changes, but this is where we're at for now. We've also toned down on ray tracing tests, mostly because outside of a few select games, it often seems to kill performance for debatable image quality upgrades. So, while more of the games have RT support, it's only enabled in six of the games — and even then, the visual upgrades are only really noticeable in three of the games. The remaining 16 games are run in pure rasterization mode.

All 22 games were tested without any upscaling or frame generation. We'll see about doing additional XeSS testing in the future, but trying to compare DLSS 2/3 (and soon 4), FSR 2/3, and XeSS performance without accounting for differences in image quality strikes us as a bad baseline way of measuring performance. Plus, we'd rather the default in games be native rendering, leaving upscaling and framegen as true performance boosting options — so you can break 120 fps or 144 fps, rather than just trying to get to 60 fps.

All games are tested using 1080p 'medium' settings (the specifics vary by game and are noted in the chart headers), along with 1080p, 1440p, and 4K 'ultra' settings. Some may wonder about the reasoning behind the selected settings, so let's quickly elaborate.

What we want to show with graphics cards is how performance scales. We include 1080p medium as a baseline "everything released in the past few years ought to handle this" setting. Then moving to 1080p ultra provides enough of a gap to be interesting — sometimes it's still only 10% slower, but other games it might be half as fast as medium settings. If we tested 1080p high instead, that's potentially one less useful piece of information.

Going beyond 1080p ultra, we don't want to change both the resolution and the settings, as there's going to be a lot of overlap between 1440p medium and 1080p ultra as an example. So we just test 1440p and 4K ultra, at least where it makes sense. And keep in mind that today's ultra is tomorrow's high, the next day's medium, and next week's low — except it's more like a year or so between each level.

The end result is that our tests will show both how GPUs run at comparable settings, where some designs may have shortcomings (e.g. insufficient VRAM or bandwidth), and provide ways for people to extrapolate how things would run at other settings. While we don't test 1440p or 4K at medium settings, if you check the 1080p medium to ultra scaling on a slower GPU from the same vendor, that should also apply (roughly) to a higher tier GPU at higher resolutions.

As we're in the process of retesting everything on our new PC and test suite, we're toning down the number of comparison points. The most direct competition for the B570 is a bit hard to pin down. The RTX 4060 and RX 7600 XT clearly cost more, but we'll include them as the "step up" options alongside the B580. The RX 7600 also costs a bit more, but it's fairly close. Then we drop to the RX 6600 and RTX 3050 as sub-$200 options that cost less than the B570. Besides those cards, we also have Nvidia's RTX 3060 12GB (which isn't so readily available these days), and we also tested the Arc A770 and A750.

The primary competition for the B570 ends up being older GPUs that are on their way out, and we don't really expect any new AMD or Nvidia GPUs to target the sub-$250 market. Maybe we'll be wrong, but we suspect the eventual RTX 5060 will likely cost $299 or more, and RX 9060 will likewise probably cost $299 or more. That at least gives Intel a clear win as the least expensive new graphics card. If you want to get an idea of where other GPUs might land, check out our full GPU benchmarks hierarchy — and then use the percentage increase in the hierarchy and apply that to the test data from this review.

Our test PCs are now running Windows 11 24H2, with all the updates applied. We're also using Nvidia's PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware, which means we can grab real power use, GPU clocks, and more during our gaming benchmarks. We'll cover those results on the page with power use.

Finally, because GPUs aren't purely for gaming these days, we've run some professional and AI application tests. We've previously tested Stable Diffusion, using various custom scripts, but to level the playing field we're turning to standardized benchmarks. We use Procyon, and run the AI Vision test as well as the Stable Diffusion 1.5 and XL tests; MLPerf Client 0.5 preview for AI text generation; SPECworkstation 4.0 for Handbrake transcoding, AI inference, and professional applications; 3DMark DXR Feature Test to check raw hardware RT performance; and finally Blender Benchmark 4.3.0 for professional 3D rendering.

• MORE: Best Graphics Cards
• MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
• MORE: All Graphics Content