$250 To Play Is Not Unreasonable
It hurts to drop $1000 on a GPU, even more so up here in Canada where the price is almost doubled. What once was a price tier reserved for Titan GPUs that hardly anyone bought has now become what you have to pay for a high end card. The pricing, well deserved or not, puts high end GPUs out of the reach of many, meanwhile the mid-range has languished somewhat. NVIDIA’s RTX 4060 sits around $300, as does AMD’s RX 7600XT. The somewhat less powerful RX 7600 goes for just over $250, making it affordable if not particularly powerful.
Intel’s B580 Battlemage offers 12GB of memory on a 192-bit memory bus and sucks down a mere 120-130W under load. It’s performance meets or beats the competition, though to be fair that competition is more than a year old, making it a great choice for 1080p or even 1440p gaming. If the B580 is anything like it’s predecessor the performance will continue to increase as new drivers arrive.
That leads us to the bad news. That $250 MSRP is a dream, the B580 sells for between $370-$400 at the moment, which destroys the price to performance benefit it would offer at MSRP. If you find yourself wanting to know more about the performance of the B580 in a specific game, for when the price comes down, you can check out Ars Technica as well as the links below.