The Arc B580 launched at $249, looking like a solid budget card on paper, but gamers quickly found it fell on its face when paired with older CPUs. By “older” we mean even AMD’s Zen 3 chips from just a few years ago managed to choke the card.

Intel admitted the overhead problem and has been pushing out driver updates at a steady clip.

Hardware Unboxed recently re-tested the Arc B580 and found major improvements. Games that previously showed crippling regressions, like Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered on a Ryzen 5 5600, now run within striking distance of AMD’s RX 9060 XT 8 GB.

Starting with driver version 7028 in August, performance gains of 30 per cent or more have been measured against earlier branches.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty showed an even bigger turnaround, with the Arc B580 keeping pace with AMD’s rival card when paired with a Ryzen 5 2600. Other titles such as Dying Light: The Beast, Marvel Rivals, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and Borderlands 4 all saw notable boosts, particularly when running on Ryzen 5600.

Not everything is rosy yet. Ryzen 2600 users still get hammered by CPU overhead with Intel’s card, and plenty of titles continue to reveal the cracks. But with a Ryzen 5600 or better, the problem has mostly faded into the background.

With the B580 now selling at $249 and offering 12 GB of memory at that price point, it has become one of the few genuinely interesting budget GPUs around. If Intel keeps the driver updates coming, Arc might finally stop being the butt of GPU jokes.