249 dollars. That is the price at which Intel has launched its new Intel Arc B580, some graphics cards that instead of trying to compete with the best of AMD or NVIDIA, they try to conquer a segment that the two of them seem to have forgotten: that of affordable gaming.

A Christmas gift from Intel. The company is going through one of the biggest crises in its historybut that hasn’t stopped him from offering us a great Christmas gift. The Intel Arc B580 is a surprising proposal, especially considering that both AMD and NVIDIA have been focusing on increasingly powerful and, above all, more expensive GPUs for years.

Balance. Instead, the Intel Arc B580 offers great features at an almost unbeatable price. Instead of trying to fight for the high-end, Intel is trying here to win over gamers who either don’t need as many features, or have a tighter budget. And it seems that they have been completely right.

What are the Intel Arc B580 like?. These graphics cards with the new Battlemage architecture (with TSMC N5 photolithography) have 12 GB of video memory, XeSS 2 support (Intel DLSS) and above all a performance that is spectacular for the $249 they cost in the US. The evidence that have published all media type it make it clear: we are looking at a graphics card that competes head-to-head with the NVIDIA RTX 4060 and even the RTX 4060 Ti, but at a significantly lower price: these graphics cards cost at least 50 dollars more.

But they consume. Perhaps the only big drawback of these graphics – apart from not enjoying technologies such as DLSS, exclusive to NVIDIA – is their consumption. Its TDP is 190 W, and here, for example, NVIDIA’s RTX 4060 are more efficient. Even so, they remain a particularly notable option for playing both 1080p and 1440p with fluidity and a high level of detail, even with demanding games.

Exceptional demand. The expectation for these graphics was high due to their price-performance ratio, and the response when they were finally put on sale last week has been outstanding. In fact, the Intel Arc B580 are either sold out, or if they are available, they are at a notable premium which shows that speculators want to take advantage of the high demand. On eBay it’s normal find them for prices around $400 instead of the $249 they would normally sell for.

But NVIDIA could react soon. It has been rumored for weeks that NVIDIA is preparing the launch of its new RTX 5000. The firm may take the opportunity to launch an alternative that competes with the new Intel Arc B580, although a priori it seems difficult: NVIDIA has not stopped raising prices of its graphics with each new generation and its managers are determined to don’t lower those prices.

In techopiniones | Intel is growing dwarfs: the market share of its dedicated graphics cards is practically non-existent