Intel Arc B570 Graphics Performance On Linux Review

Last month when Intel formally introduced Battlemage graphics their initial products in the B-Series were the B570 and B580 graphics cards. The B580 went on sale in December and we’ve been busy testing the B580 on Linux since while today the embargo expires on the Arc B570 with those graphics cards going on sale this morning. Here is a first look at the Intel Arc B570 graphics and compute performance under Linux with their latest open-source drivers.

The Intel Arc B570 is quite similar to the Arc B580 but cut-down in dropping from 20 to 18 Xe cores as well as ray-tracing units, 144 XMX AI engines down from 160, and a graphics clock of 2.5GHz compared to 2.67GHz with the B580. The Arc B570 also has only 10GB of video memory on a 160-bit interface compared to the 12GB 192-bit memory with the B580.

The cut-down Intel Arc B570 though is rated for a 150 Watt board power compared to 190 Watts with the B580. The reduced specs also means a lower price point at $219+ USD compared to the Arc B580 graphics cards retailing for $249+. The Intel Arc B570 relies on a PCI Express 4.0 x8 interface and can drive four displays simultaneously via HDMI 2.1 and DIsplayPort 2.1 connections.

For this launch day testing, the review sample provided by Intel was the ASRock Challenger Arc B570 graphics card model.

Ultimately the Intel Arc B570 comes down to being a decent budget graphics card at just above the $200 price point while having 10GB of vRAM with many lower-end cards having 8GB at around that price point. Additionally for Linux users another benefit to the Intel Arc B570 when it comes to budget graphics cards is being able to enjoy the fully open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack.

With the Intel Arc B570 using a BMG-G21 GPU like the Arc B580, the open-source Linux GPU driver support is in good standing and along the same lines as I’ve been writing about last month since the launch-day Arc B580 and other follow-up news articles around open-source driver improvements focused on Xe2 / Battlemage.

As mentioned in the Arc B580 review, for Linux support you will want to be on the Linux 6.12 upstream kernel or newer — Linux 6.13 is releasing as stable likely this Sunday (19 January) with further improvements and it’s Linux 6.19 Git that was used for this Battlemage testing. Mesa 24.3 and newer has the Battlemage support for the Intel Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV (Vulkan) driver support. The very latest optimizations and other improvements especially on the Vulkan side will be found in the Mesa 25.0 release later this quarter. For this Battlemage testing the latest Mesa 25.0-devel code was used that can be conveniently obtained on Ubuntu systems via the Oibaf PPA.

Long story short, with an up-to-date Linux installation you can have nice out-of-the-box support for the Arc B-Series graphics cards. With this Arc B570 launch happening one month after the Arc B580, the launch-day B570 driver support is more well polished as mentioned in recent articles with Battlemage driver enhancements continuing to land within Mesa, the Intel Compute Runtime, and other components.