SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC video card review — serious competitor for NVIDIA and AMD or «toy titan»?

Mid-range graphics cards have always attracted special attention from budget-conscious gamers, so the release of the second generation Intel Xe2 Battlemage has aroused considerable interest and even intrigue among them. This time, the SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC video card arrived for editorial review, positioned as a potential competitor to NVIDIA RTX 4060 and AMD RX 7600 XT

Technical specifications of SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC

Interface	PCI-E Gen 4.0 x8
Technical process	5 nm
Graphics processor	Intel Arc B580
VRAM speed	19 Gbps
VRAM capacity	16GB GDDR6 Samsung K4ZAF325BC-SC20
Memory bus	192-bit
Streaming processors	2560
Exits	3 x DisplayPort v2.1
	1 x HDMI v2.1a
Power connector	8 Pin
Energy consumption	200 W
Recommended power supply	700 W
Additionally	Video card holder stand
Dimensions	315 x 117 x 44 mm
Weight	952 grams
Takes up space	2.2 slots
Power supply phases	8 (6 + 2)
Controller	Alpha & Omega Semiconductor AOZ71137QI
DrMOS	Alpha & Omega AOZ5517QI — 60 А

Test bench

The SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC graphics card was tested on a test bench with the following components:

• Motherboard MSI MEG Z890 ACE;
• Processor Intel Core Ultra 9 285K;
• Cooling MSI MAG CORELIQUID I360;
• Drive Samsung SSD 980 1TB; 
• RAM G.Skill Trident Z5 CK 2x24Gb Royal;
• Power supply MSI MPG A1000G PCIE5 1000W;
• Body MSI MPG GUNGNIR 300R AIRFLOW.

Package, appearance and cooling SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC

The Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC arrived for SPARKLE’s editorial review in a nice box made in the original blue and purple colors. On it, the manufacturer classically noted the key features and proprietary technologies supported by the video card.

If you shook the box a little, you could hear a metallic rumble, as if something had fallen off inside. As it turned out, it was the additional attributes of the package — a leg for fixing and a metal branded letter S that can be attached to the case thanks to magnets. They are a bit strangely fixed and not packed in separate dampers, so they hit each other during transportation.

The video card itself is in an antistatic package and is fixed between two separate panels of pressed cardboard. I’ve seen the blue color scheme in products of the IceQ line back in the last decade. The video card looks very impressive and unusual, except for the fans. Despite its considerable dimensions (315 x 117 x 44 mm), it is not heavy for a 200W power consumption, weighing only 952 grams. It is powered via a single 8-pin connector.

Behind the video card is a metal plate with a special grille for air intake. The name of the manufacturer «Sparkle» five times appears on various elements of the video card: from fans to the interface panel. They have been an authorized partner of Intel for more than a decade, although their cooperation has been more focused on the industrial sector.

There are three DisplayPort 2.1 and one HDMI 2.1a ports for connecting a display. After installing the video card in your PC, you will see the Intel ARC logo illuminated.

The cooling system covers the basic heat dissipation of the SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC with a margin. It consists of three fans, four heat pipes, and a nickel-plated radiator that cool both the GPU and memory with VRM zone elements

Performance and architecture

VideSPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC card is based on Intel’s second-generation graphics architecture, codenamed Battlemage. We have already seen this technology in the integrated graphics of Intel Core Ultra 200V «Lunar Lake» processors for laptops when we tested ASUS Zenbook S 14 UX5406. Now it has made its debut in second-generation Intel discrete graphics cards

The new Battlemage architecture is largely similar to the previous one, but it is an improved version of it. Celestial and Druid are still expected in the future. All of them are based on the Xe-HPG microarchitecture, which will undergo gradual changes and improvements over time

In the working performance of SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC, the situation directly depends on the acceleration support in software applications and the features of the benchmarks themselves. In the performance test Blender The situation is very disappointing: only — 1868 points compared to 3150 at NVIDIA RTX 4060. reason mhe reason for this is that version 4.3.0 supports Nvidia Optix, Intel OneAPI, and AMD HIP libraries. They are not equivalent in terms of optimization, but the rendering is launched taking into account the family of video cards.

But in the video transcoding tests SPECworkstation 4.0 SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC wins a landslide victory over NVIDIA RTX 4060 by almost 30%. In GeekBench 6, the advantage over the RTX 4060 is about 7%.

Sometimes during the performance measurements it seemed that it was beta testing. Cinebench 2024 crashed with an error, rendering in Realistic Interior Lightning failed because the program refused to run on SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC. The last time I saw such an unstable situation was when I was testing the ARM platform in compatibility mode with Windows applications.

The shells for offline image generation by a neural network also refused to work correctly, with the exception of Amuse 2.3.2 Beta. But even it periodically crashed with an error, preventing the generation of 10 images in a row. Nevertheless, the monitoring showed that the video card was loaded, meaning that the AI acceleration was working. If the test was successful, the result was 52 seconds.

All these nuances are more likely to concern software developers. We hope that the issue of Intel graphics card support will normalize over time

SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC gaming performance

SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC was tested in popular gaming projects at FullHD and QuadHD resolutions. Given the support for only eight PCIe lines, there is no point in running 4K games on it. In standard performance measurements, we will try to compare it with the RTX 4060 graphics card, which contains 8 GB of video memory and a 128-bit bus.

Game + preset	RTX 4060	SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 (FullHD, DLSS + Framegenerator – OFF)	54	49
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (FullHD, High, DLSS – OFF, FG – OFF, RT – OFF)	59	59
Cyberpunk 2077 (FullHD, High, DLSS, XeSS 2 – OFF, RT – OFF)	90	87
Silent Hill 2 Remake (FullHD, Epic, High, DLSS, XeSS 2 – OFF, FG – OFF)	52	34
Counter-Strike 2  (FullHD, Very High)	216	181
Forza Horizon 5 (FullHD, Extreme,  DLSS — OFF, FG – OFF, RT – ON)	117	118
Remnant 2  (FullHD, High, DLSS, XeSS 2 + FG – OFF)	67	63

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 even at 1080p resolution — a tough nut to crack for mid-range graphics cards. If you don’t use technology Intel XeSS 2, we will only be able to play at 49 frames per second. XeSS 2 with rendering at 76% of the original resolution gives us 75 fps S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 does not yet support XeSS 2 FG — frame generator.

Game + preset	SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 (QuadHD, DLSS + Framegenerator – OFF)	34
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 (FullHD, DLSS + Framegenerator – OFF)	49
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 (FullHD, Ultra, XeSS 2 – 66%, Framegenerator – OFF)	97
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 (FullHD, Ultra, XeSS 2 – 76%, Framegenerator – OFF)	75
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 (FullHD, Ultra, XeSS 2 – 100%, Framegenerator – OFF)	42

I don’t recommend turning on AMD’s FG, because in this case the game’s controls turn into jelly, although it demonstrates a higher frame rate. At QuadHD with the XeSS 2 you are unlikely to survive in the Exclusion Zone. The probability of catching «olive» at 34 fps increases significantly. Therefore, you will have to enable XeSS 2 in Quality mode and do not count on frame generator from AMD.

If we compare FSR, DLSS, and XeSS 2, then the undisputed victory in image quality in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 belongs to NVIDIA. But Intel has implemented the scaling technology much better than AMD. This is clearly visible in the comparison screenshots. In mode FullHD S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 consumes less than 6 gigabytes of video memory.

Optimal settings for playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 in Full HD: moderate quality, XeSS 2 — 76%. We get about 55-60 frames per second and a good response in the gameplay.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle at FullHD at ultra-settings in the jungle without upscaling shows us an average of 49 fps, and neither frame generation nor XeSS 2. Although NVIDIA has recently added support for the brand new DLSS 4 + MFG x4. This is a typical example where support for proprietary technologies is very important for gameplay

Changing the settings to the medium preset does not give any noticeable result. The only thing is that at medium graphics settings the amount of graphics memory used is 7.3 GB, so we can conclude that this game rests on the performance of the video chip. The card is in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle consumed approximately 126-128 W, and its temperature did not exceed 58 °C for memory and 55 °C for the GPU.

Check game performance Remnant 2 is best in a densely populated city. On the main street, the FPS will usually drop SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC demonstrates 60-65 fps here even without enabling supersampling. Frametime periodically jerks in the region of 14 to 28 ms.

Game + preset	SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC
Remnant 2  (FullHD, High, XeSS 2 + Framegenerator – OFF)	63
Remnant 2  (FullHD, High, XeSS 2 – 100%, Framegenerator – OFF)	62
Remnant 2  (FullHD, High, XeSS 2 – 76%, Framegenerator – OFF)	75

With 6 GB of memory, the card consumes about 160 watts, and the fans reach 1000 rpm. At FullHD SPARKLE, the Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC consumes 1.2 GB more video memory than graphics cards with a total capacity of 8 GB. If you turn on AMD’s frame generator, the situation will resemble S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. The number of frames increases by about 30%, but we get extra «jelliness» Management. With Intel XeSS 2 Ultra Quality, the number of frames in a difficult location will fluctuate between 72-75 FPS, which is quite good.

Difference in image quality when using XeSS 2 or FSR is not important in this game project.

Optimal settings for playing Remnant 2 at Full HD: High, XeSS 2 Ultra Quality — 76%. We get more than 75 frames per second and good feedback in the gameplay.

В Cyberpunk 2077 on the Remnant 2 test configuration showed a suspiciously low number of frames. This was not the case with other video cards. Perhaps there was some kind of bug or driver issue. That’s why I’m not including the results as official. The game itself consumes 6.6 GB of video memory at FullHD.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to enable Intel XeSS 2 and AMD frame generation at the same time, because in Cyberpunk 2077 is available only with FSR, which in turn spoils the picture. It is worth noting that XeSS 2 looks almost on par with DLSS, the picture doesn’t lose any quality, and it reduces memory consumption by 300 MB. As usual, the situation with FSR looks unfortunate.

In the game Forza 5 on FullHD, ultra-setups without super-sampling and frame generation, we honestlyincluding 114 fps in the built-in benchmark. Its competitor — RTX4060 shows a similar result. Without XeSS 2, the picture seems more detailed in still images, but then you can see ladders on the edges. Of course, this is not perceived in dynamics.

Silent hill 2 can only be played on medium settings and with XeSS 2 or FSR enabled. But at the same time, the foggy place turns into a «soapbox». What can you do if is simply unplayable without turning off super-sampling because of the terrible FPS drops. This game has never been well optimized and is very demanding on the performance of the video chip, although on a seven-year-old «titanium from the past» — 1080 Ti, no such problems were observed

Playing Silent Hill on Intel Ark 580 is still uncomfortable due to the low frame rate and almost as difficult as the original 2001 game. A disturbed figure almost killed me because «drawdowns» of personnel during combat sometimes led to fatalities.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 at QuadHD will not bring joy to a demanding gamer. Therefore, it is better to limit yourself to FullHD resolution. Unfortunately, there is no support for XeSS 2 isn’t in this game yet, so we’ll have to settle for FSR. But with it, our matured Henry looks as if you forgot to put on your glasses. Therefore, the golden mean here is to use the Medium preset without super-sampling. In this case, you will see a brutal Middle Ages at 55 fps.

Counter-Strike 2 with eSports settings, you can’t even run on the built-in graphics, let alone mid-range video adapters. Nevertheless, on Dust2, the number of FPS varies between 200-300 fps on low settings, depending on the number of players and the situation on the map. At QuadHD and high settings, the frame rate will be over 150 fps, which will appeal to owners of 144Hz monitors.

Medieval stealth action — in A Plague Tale: Requiem With XeSS 2 turned off, at 1920 x 1080 pixels, it delivers 37 frames per second. If you don’t ignore Super Sampling — Quality, the frame rate stays at 53 fps, and with Balanced it’s already 69 fps. This is the best way to play the game.

We can sayand that SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC «almost pulls» Crysis 3 Remastered. With raytracing and Ultra mode enabled, FPS drops will not allow you to fully enjoy the gameplay in FullHD. By enabling raytracing with the preset «High» we will observe a stable 70-80 frames without any dropouts. It is in this mode «oldies» will be able to remember the good old days with their favorite toy.

Power consumption, noise and heat SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC

The cooling system in the SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC easily copes with such power consumption and works perfectly. Even during resource-intensive gaming adventures, the coolers hardly stood out from the general noise background of the test system. The SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC heated up to a maximum of 61 degrees Celsius for the graphics chip and 66 ℃ for the memory. Furmark was able to overheat it the most. At this point, the fan speed was only 955 RPM. The backplate also did not stand out from the main temperature regime within the case — total 39℃. In idle mode, the video card consumes about 30 watts, which is very high for our time. The maximum recorded power consumption did not rise above 184 watts during the gameComparing the amount of energy consumed with the RTX 4060, you will overpay about 800 UAH for energy consumption per year at a tariff of 4.32 UAH if you work and play on a PC with SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC. In countries with higher market electricity prices, the difference will be even more significant.

Experience of use

Since I had an MSI RTX 4060 Ventus in addition to SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC, I could evaluate and test them myself on the same bench and versions of games. The available tests on YouTube or other specialized resources do not always accurately convey the overall picture or often try to select settings that favor one or another opponent.I use my graphics card not only for gaming, but mostly for non-professional workflows. Therefore, it is important for me that graphics acceleration works in as much software as possible: from video editors to offline neural networks. In such scenarios, SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC proved to be unstable and most software simply did not start or worked incorrectly with crashes and errorsIf we take into account the situation in games, the picture is more cheerful, although the victory varies depending on the specific project and the selected settings. I would like to praise Intel’s XeSS 2 implementation, which works much better than AMD’s FSR and is close to NVIDIA DLSS in terms of quality and speed. Unfortunately, frame generation technology is almost not supported in modern gaming projects, and the use of AMD’s open FG leads to «jellies» in management and is of no use.We can argue a lot about the player’s choice: Intel vs. AMD vs. NVIDIA, but in graphics cards of this price range, support for super-sampling and generation technologies is needed as a «breath of fresh air», especially for QuadHD modes. And this is exactly the main problem for both previous AMD and current Intel graphics cards, because they lag behind their opponents — NVIDIA in neural technologies. With DLSS+FG, I was able to achieve better picture and response in the gameplay, especially in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, the very heavy Silent Hill 2, and new titles: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.For QuadHD gaming, the performance of SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC is sorely lacking. This is where a proprietary frame generator would come in handy, but unfortunately, its support in modern games is rare. In addition, 8 gigabytes of video memory was enough for all tested game projects, and all limitations rested on the performance of the graphics chip. I also noticed that games in SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC usually consume more video memory than RTX 4060 in equivalent modes.

Intel’s Grafics Software is still not as flexible and functional as its competitors. I haven’t found a DSR analog, and the native overlay lacks information. Also, the video card didn’t want to work with my DisplayPort to HDMI adapter, so I couldn’t work with two monitors at the same time as usual.

Prices and competitors

SPARKLE Intel Arc B580 TITAN OC is available at a price starting at UAH 14,927. With this price, it has many serious competitors.Gigabyte Radeon RX 7600 XT GAMING OC 16G in a three-fan design can be a good alternative for AMD fans. It is built on RDNA 3 contains 16 gigabytes of video memory, but with a smaller bus — 128 bits. In addition, it consumes 10 watts less power.Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4060 EAGLE OC 8G will take up less space in your case despite the fact that the cooling system is also based on three fans. With lower power consumption and almost the same performance, you can save money on a power supply when building a new PC or upgrading an existing one.MSI GeForce RTX 4060 VENTUS 2X BLACK 8G OC can be a great choice for smaller cases that don’t have room for large graphics cards. Two coolers are enough to keep temperatures low enough, albeit with a bit more noise.

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