Intel Arc b580 Vs. RTX 4060: Game Performance And Value Analysis

Comprehensive evaluation reveals how Intel’s Arc b580 balances cost-per-frame value, VRAM advantages, and CPU overhead across fifty modern games.

Hardware by Katmin on Jun 06, 2025

With a huge 12 GB of video memory and performance equivalent to NVIDIA’s RTX 4060 at a quarter of the price, Intel’s Arc b580 GPU came into the market with a strong promise. That story was supported by early evaluations of a dozen well-known titles, which positioned the b580 as an unexpected competitor in the sub-$300 market.

Subsequent research, however, revealed a CPU-overhead problem that can severely reduce frame rates when the GPU is used with a processor that isn’t high-end. I started a thorough reevaluation after learning this, placing the Arc b580 into a system with an Intel Core i9-13900KS to reduce CPU bottlenecks and analyzing how it behaved in 50 different games.

What follows is a detailed account of those findings, organized by performance tiers, averaged outcomes, and a revisited cost-per-frame analysis, all woven into a narrative that speaks directly to gamers weighing their next upgrade.

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Dominant Performers and VRAM Advantages

When you sit down to play Fortnite with the Arc b580, you’ll notice right away that it handles shader compilation more gracefully than many competitors. Once the shaders have been thoroughly compiled, I consistently saw frame rates north of 200 fps at 1080p, which translates into exceptionally smooth gameplay, even on high-refresh-rate monitors.

Transitioning to 1440p, the card maintained an impressive 160 fps, ensuring that you can lock in those tight building and aiming windows without surprises. Although the RTX 4060 still holds a slight edge in absolute peak numbers, the difference is marginal enough that, in practical terms, you will find the experience more than satisfying.

In Horizon Forbidden West, the b580’s 12 GB buffer flexes its muscles. I observed average frame rates about 20% higher than what the RTX 4060 delivered, with 1% lows leaping ahead by some 42%. At 1440p, the situation becomes even more stark: the Arc GPU runs 56% faster on average and delivers over double the 1% low performance.

In the lush, demanding landscapes of Forbidden West, stutters that afflict 8 GB cards just disappear, giving the scene a sense of fluidity and life rather than choppiness and fragmentation. It’s at this point that you realize how crucial VRAM is to contemporary open-world engines.

Similarly, in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, the b580 doesn’t just keep pace; it outpaces the 4060 by around 15% at 1080p and 16% at 1440p, delivering seamless world traversal and lightning-fast loading of intricate particle and geometry effects.

When I switched to The Last of Us Part I, using the ultra-quality preset at 1440p, the Arc card continued its strong showing, outpacing the GeForce rival by nearly 30% on average and more than double its 1% low metric. If you’re investing in a GPU for cinematic, narrative-driven titles, the b580’s headroom ensures that you’re never fighting hitches or sudden frame drops during tense story beats.

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Competitive Upscaling and Epic-Level Ambitions

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty represents a benchmark of modern graphical ambition, and I was impressed to find the b580 delivering 15% higher average frame rates at 1080p and a staggering 29% improvement at 1440p compared to the RTX 4060.

This result highlights how, even on demanding titles where you might rely on DLSS or XeSS upscaling, the Arc GPU can handle native resolutions with remarkable ease. When you combine this with upscaling techniques, the system feels more responsive than you’d expect from a sub-$300 part.

Hitman 3, with its ultra preset and ray-tracing effects disabled, still taxed most cards at high settings. On the b580, I recorded an average of 145 fps at 1080p—12% faster than the 4060—and saw a 27% lead at 1440p.

For Hitman fans who prize high refresh rates and fluid movement through complex indoor maps, the Arc b580 delivers the steady frame pacing required to maintain pinpoint accuracy. Likewise, in Dying Light 2 Stay Human on DX11, performance gains of 17% at 1080p and 25% at 1440p were consistent during urban parkour sequences, ensuring you never hit a jarring dip while vaulting between rooftops.

Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered also benefited from the extra memory and shader throughput. With the b580, I experienced a 20% increase in average frame rates at 1080p and a 25% increase at 1440p, making web-slinging across a bustling metropolis feel genuinely cinematic.

When transitioning to Returnal on the Epic preset, I recorded a 14% advantage at 1080p and a 22% lead at 1440p—evidence that, no matter how punishing the scene complexity, the Arc GPU can sustain playability without overtaxing its VRAM.

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Mixed Bags: Midrange Titles and Upscaling Considerations

Some games landed squarely in the “mixed” category, where the b580 neither dominated nor collapsed but instead held competitive ground. Remnant II ran about 7% faster at 1080p and 18% faster at 1440p, though you may still want to engage upscaling features to lock in a stable 60 fps threshold under intense firefights.

Hogwarts Legacy matched the RTX 4060 at 1080p but pulled ahead by 11% at 1440p, increasing from an average of 53 fps to 59 fps. In these environments, the extra 4 GB of VRAM not only boosts texture fidelity but also reduces hitching when streaming assets through detailed world environments.

A Plague Tale: Requiem shone on the b580, delivering 20% faster frame rates at 1080p and extending that margin to 24% at 1440p. This title’s heavy use of particle effects and global illumination makes it a prime example of where additional memory capacity translates directly into smoother performance.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle illustrated the same truth. While average frame rates were nearly identical (+2%), 1% low performance soared by 56% on the b580, underscoring that under-the-hood VRAM limits can create jarring drops even when average metrics look fine.

Black Myth: Wukong ran flawlessly on medium settings with ray tracing disabled, achieving 79 fps at 1080p (20% faster) and 64 fps at 1440p (45% faster). Borderlands 3 showed more modest gains—11% at 1080p and 7% at 1440p—yet still provided an edge in both cell-shaded and physics-intensive set pieces.

Total War: Warhammer III, a CPU-intensive but VRAM-hungry strategy title, favored the b580 by 7% at 1080p and 9% at 1440p, smoothing out microstutters that often plague lower-memory GPUs during horde battles.

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The Overhead Issue and Actual Underperformance

Even with all of its successes, the Arc b580 has a weakness. A number of titles revealed driver immaturity and CPU-overhead limitations, highlighting the importance of using a high-end CPU, like the Core i9-13900KS, with the card for this assessment.

Rainbow Six Siege ran 22% slower at 1080p and 7% slower at 1440p despite boasting commendable raw throughput elsewhere. Assassin’s Creed Mirage lost 14% at 1080p and 8% at 1440p, with 1% lows dipping nearly 20% below the 4060’s numbers.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 saw a roughly 22% deficit at both resolutions under its basic quality preset, signaling that CPU-bound scenarios remain a pain point. Counter-Strike 2, a title that demands rapid response, trailed by 17% at 1080p and 9% at 1440p. However, its 1% lows were an interesting outlier, slightly higher than the 4060’s, hinting that in specific draw-call scenarios, the Arc architecture can pull ahead momentarily.

Starfield, by contrast, was disappointing. It delivered both low average frame rates and shockingly poor 1% lows, rendering it barely playable even at modest settings. This particular result echoes many early driver reports, where complex RPG engines push the card beyond its current optimization level.

Other titles, such as Gears 5 (34% and 31% slower at 1080p/1440p) and Halo Infinite (31% and 24% slower), revealed that first-person shooters with proprietary engines sometimes struggle more on Arc hardware.

Homeworld 3 suffered a 22% dip at 1080p and a 13% dip at 1440p, with 1% lows plunging 37% below those of the 4060. Hunt Showdown, despite showing high average frame rates, was plagued by constant, severe stutters that rendered it unplayable; I ultimately excluded it from the average calculations because it was technically unrepresentative of smooth performance.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 remains a benchmark of system ambition, and here, both the b580 and the 4060 fell short of 30 fps at 1080p—an unacceptable result for a simulation that demands consistency over peak bursts. Dragon’s Dogma 2 posted a 22%/17% deficit at 1080p/1440p, with erratic frame times marring an otherwise stable engine.

Assetto Corsa Competizione, surprisingly, ran 20% slower at 1080p and 25% slower at 1440p, challenging our assumptions that racing titles favor high-resolution performance. Star Wars Outlaws defaulted to ray-tracing effects that drove performance to a mere 40 fps at 1080p—still 18% faster than the 4060, but hardly ideal—and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and Skull and Bones presented either crashes or unacceptably low metrics.

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Averaging It Out: 50-Game Insights

When you step back and average across all fifty titles in this evaluation, the picture becomes nuanced. At 1080p, the Arc b580 is approximately 1% slower than the RTX 4060. If you remove Hunt Showdown, which, despite stellar averages, was disqualified by its catastrophic stutter, the b580 falls about 2% behind.

Conversely, at 1440p, the b580 enjoys a 5% lead. Excluding outliers, such as Flight Simulator bumps, which average up to a 7% advantage, these numbers suggest that the Arc b580 and the 4060 are far more evenly matched than early day-one tests implied, yet the b580’s broader performance swings introduce more variability from game to game.

This comprehensive dataset underlines why your CPU choice is paramount. On lower-end processors, you may see the b580’s performance degrade further, eroding its cost-per-frame lead. Yet, in VRAM-heavy modern games, the headroom provided by 12 GB often delivers noticeable smoothness gains, sometimes turning titles that stutter on 8 GB cards into buttery-smooth experiences.

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Revisiting Value: Cost-Per-Frame Analysis

At launch, based on a street price of $250 US, we calculated that the b580 offered approximately 27% better value in terms of cost per frame than the RTX 4060. With this expanded suite of benchmark data and the understanding that you need a flagship CPU to minimize overhead, that value proposition recalibrates to about a 21% advantage.

In other words, you’re still getting more performance per dollar on average, but the margin has narrowed as we account for underperforming and CPU-limited scenarios. If you swap out the Core i9-13900KS for something like a Ryzen 5 5600, you would likely see that cost-per-frame advantage evaporate or even invert. Over time, driver updates may help mitigate some of those overhead losses. Still, as of today, you need to budget not only for the GPU itself but also for the CPU required to enable it to operate efficiently.

Furthermore, market realities have driven many b580 listings north of $250 US, which can easily eat into the theoretical savings and make the 4060 or competing Radeon options more appealing, especially when availability and retail pricing are volatile.

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Practical Aspects and Concluding Remarks

As long as you have or intend to match it with a high-end CPU, the Arc b580 is still a viable option if you’re looking for a cheap GPU and can consistently get it for close to its $250 MSRP. The extra 12 GB of memory is a standout advantage for modern titles, offering smooth gameplay and better future-proofing as texture sizes and world complexity continue to grow.

You should, however, prepare for occasional driver-related quirks, inconsistent performance swings across different engines, and the possibility that some titles will never be fully optimized on Arc hardware.

On the other hand, if you cannot secure the b580 at its intended price, or if a midrange processor already constrains your build, you might find more predictable performance and fewer headaches with an RTX 4060 or even a Radeon RX 7600, both of which benefit from proven architectures and mature drivers. In any case, Intel has made great strides since its initial Arc attempt, and future driver updates and CPU-overhead reductions could further work in the b580’s favor.

Ultimately, the decision is based on your priorities and particular configuration. If you prioritize raw cost-per-frame in VRAM-hungry open-world and cinematic titles—and if you’re prepared to spend money on a powerful CPU—the Arc b580 is the greatest option under $300.

NVIDIA’s products might still be superior if you desire stability across a large library of games, less stutter risk, and wider ecosystem support. In any case, there should be healthy competition, and Intel’s arrival has undoubtedly upended the industry by giving players more choices and spurring innovation everywhere.

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