Intel Arc B580 massively underperforms when paired with older CPUs

[Iamsiege7817]

I feel like this is a non-event, MOST gamers would have much newer systems then one from 2018. Either way this card is still great bang for the buck in a lot of newer games.

 

[BogdanR]

Look at the results in the article and HU testing, even a Ryzen 5700X3D experiences a pronounced slow-down in certain (high CPU utilisation) titles with the B580. This isn't just limited to people with potato CPUs from 5 years ago. It also makes the B580 significantly slower than the 4060 in many titles, which negates any reason to buy a B580 in my opinion given they are the same price.

The reality is that most B580 reviews which were done on 7800X3D/9800X3D processors (to remove the CPU bottleneck) are pretty misleading for the types of setups people actually buying a B580 will be using. People aren't buying $250 GPUs to pair with a $500 CPU, it is usually the other way around. If you have a Ryzen 7600-like CPU or slower, the B580 appears inferior to the 4060/7600.

We’re talking about less than a handful of games, so, generalizing much? For the rest of the games B580 puts the 4060 to shame, or so it seems. By the looks of it, most likely a driver issue of some sort.
Besides a 5700x3d is not $500. More like $200. And it would deliver adequate performance even in that handful of games.
Buying a 4060 never made any sense. Even less now with the upcoming 5000 series.

 

[Tom Yum]

We’re talking about less than a handful of games, so, generalizing much? For the rest of the games B580 puts the 4060 to shame, or so it seems. By the looks of it, most likely a driver issue of some sort.
Besides a 5700x3d is not $500. More like $200. And it would deliver adequate performance even in that handful of games.
Buying a 4060 never made any sense. Even less now with the upcoming 5000 series.

A handful of games out of a handful of games tested. We don't know yet how extensive the issue will be, other than the greater the games CPU load (a trend that will only get worse with increasing number of UE5 Nanite and Lumen games) and the slower the processor the more severe the issue is. It may be a driver issue, though one that has seemingly existed since A750/770, however both cards were too low performant (and sold too poorly) to get the level of scrutiny required by tech media to identify and inform the wider public (some smaller YouTube reviewers did identify the issue). That doesn't strike me with confidence that Intel can fix it, it seems to be a fundamental aspect of the architecture and how it needs to be driven by the CPU.

End of the day we need more data, but IMO it is enough to hold off buying a B580 until the issue is confirmed to be very isolated or it is fixed by Intel. Re: 4060, buying any GPU makes no sense just prior to 5060/9060 launches, B580 included.

 

[BogdanR]

A handful of games out of a handful of games tested. We don't know yet how extensive the issue will be, other than the greater the games CPU load (a trend that will only get worse with increasing number of UE5 Nanite and Lumen games) and the slower the processor the more severe the issue is. It may be a driver issue, though one that has seemingly existed since A750/770, however both cards were too low performant (and sold too poorly) to get the level of scrutiny required by tech media to identify and inform the wider public (some smaller YouTube reviewers did identify the issue). That doesn't strike me with confidence that Intel can fix it, it seems to be a fundamental aspect of the architecture and how it needs to be driven by the CPU.

End of the day we need more data, but IMO it is enough to hold off buying a B580 until the issue is confirmed to be very isolated or it is fixed by Intel. Re: 4060, buying any GPU makes no sense just prior to 5060/9060 launches, B580 included.

A lot of speculation here.
As for buying a card right now is pretty difficult as it is. For instance Canada Computers has a total of 36 4070 Ti Super for ALL Canada. Unsurprisingly, all selling over MSRP. AMD cards have gone up in price as well. Any card that’s worth buying is either not in stock or over MSRP.
It’s great to have this much competition in the GPU space. / sarcasm off

 

[AlphaLyrae]

Did PCIe x8 link drop to 3.0? That's half bandwidth vs 4.0, so if there's quite a bit of bus traffic from copies or memory writes (which increase with ReBar), that can certainly contribute to reduced performance.

 

[Dharan]

Looks like intel got an architecture that scales well with CPU memory access latency... looks like even 9800x3d is not bottlenecked by b580... I wish intel just make an arc that is twice or thrice as powerful as B580 without worrying about power consumption...

 

[bviktor]

They're "investigating", like they're (not) investigating why their Wi-Fi 7 chips don't work with AMD CPUs?

 

[Vanderlinde]

Likely sending lots of single core instructions to the GPU. Lots of overhead coming from the driver that is.

 

[Fastturtle]

ISeeing as how it appears to be a limited issue, I'm hoping that it is a Driver Problem and can be solve it soon. Right now, I'm suspecting a feature issue being miss used by the games suffering the problems so it should be fixable. Of course, this is one of the problems we're now suffering in regards to software as the hardware makers are being pushed to solve bad programming decisions.

 

[Shirley Dulcey]

The issue is most likely not the CPUs themselves, but the fact that the platforms those CPUs are on do not support resizable BAR and PCIe Gen 4. Intel did all its driver development with resizable BAR in mind, supporting systems that do not have it only grudgingly. The B580 only has 8 PCIe lanes, which means it will take a substantial performance hit in systems that lack Gen 4 support because of inadequate memory bandwidth.

It's unfortunate for people looking for a cost effective graphics upgrade for older systems; the price of the B580 would be really attractive if it could reach its full potential. Intel's ARC cards are not that and never have been. (The A series cards had the same issue.) But that's a small market, and I understand why Intel has not made it a priority.

 

[Shirley Dulcey]

Looks like intel got an architecture that scales well with CPU memory access latency... looks like even 9800x3d is not bottlenecked by b580... I wish intel just make an arc that is twice or thrice as powerful as B580 without worrying about power consumption...

They are widely believed to be working on higher end models that will compete in the midrange market. Think next generation replacement for the A770 and A750, likely all priced below $400. I don't believe they have any intention of producing a high end card (something competitive with NVidia's 80 and 90 cards) at this time.

Intel's #1 priority at this time is to get their chip manufacturing working again. With their abandonment of the 20A process, that's going to have to wait at least until 18A is in volume production.

 

[Zigmeister]

That's honestly awful. Nobody should buy this if a 5600 can't extract 100% of its performance.

?Where was 5600 mentioned in the article?

 

[atmu5fear]

This is actual very helpful. My oldest daughter wants a PC for school and the occasional game, so for her birthday I'm upgrading my older gaming PC. It's nothing special, but I was using it until last year and the biggest drawback was the VRAM. It's an I7 7700 with a 1060 3gb. In order to make it usable I figured I'd upgrade the GPU for now, and we can do the CPU and motherboard later this year. I debated between the 4060, the 7600 xt and this card. Had been leaning to this card but with it being out of stock just went with the 7600 xt, similar price to the 4060 but double the vram.

 

[WhiteLeaff]

?Where was 5600 mentioned in the article?

Huh? Did you just read the title? @-@

 

[AngelG]

I suspect that many things happen in the driver software libs instead of hardware so the CPU has to "help" the videocard to perform.
If you remember, back in time, we had hardware accelerated 3D sound in the sound cards with api like A3D and Creative EAX. It gone, now it is software only. I suspect something similar might happened with the videocards.

 

[ChipBoundary]

""Occasional problem"" like 2 entire generations of CPUs that explode

You mean the problem that affected less than 1% of all sold stock and was completely mitigated with a BIOS update? That problem? Plus they offered extended warranties and free replacements even though they didn't have to? It only affected a rare few from the top end SKU's, which I have and it continues to run fine after over a year of constant operation and heavy usage.

Where is AMD's response to literally decades of poor software? Hmm? And yes, it's still a major problem, and it has never not been. When it got announced that AMD bought ATI I knew it was a mistake. Decades later and I'm proven right. AMD knows it too, because they aren't even trying to compete with Nvidia anymore.

 

[vvtunes]

Pairing a B580 card with a high-end CPU seems an unlikely scenario. Perhaps a new version of the driver could improve the situation... unless it is in fact some hard limit imposed by the PCIe bus. Anyway, it's currently bad news for both Intel and end users.

 

[ThomasTECH]

I have to address the testing method, this is a niche test, and should be more real world. Are CPU's primarily to run games I never heard of? I would like to see the performance of productivity apps like photoshop, multi-monitor setups for communications tools like skype, Cloud management software MS Azure, Specific tasks like zipping up a large data file. Slamming new CPU's into older setups is always a no, no. You need to test the equipment in it's optimum setup, this seems more like an attention grabbing hit piece. 99 out of 100 IT techs, don't have the professionalism to even craft a fair assessment of Hardware is my current view.

 

[netcownt]

Given that 60% of Win user base is not upgrading to Win 11 ( Techbase article today) and even on Steam stats it is about 50%, it says to me people are using older cpus. (Mine is a i7 2600k happily married with a 3060ti). So this is a big blow for Arc, if it is by design.

 

[KevTheDankest]

For my buddy's PC it runs buttery smooth.

Intel 7700k
Asus Z270-A Prime
32GB Ram XMP 3200 enabled
Asrock B580 Challenger 12GB

I had to flash a modded BIOS for him to enable ReBar and reinstall the graphics drivers after using DDU, but that's about it.

He loves the performance of it.