Intel finally releases its Arc A580 graphics card — and its price might make it the best cheap GPU going

Intel surprised everyone this week when it released its Arc A580 graphics card, a GPU that was first announced last year but which had otherwise been missing in action ever since.

The Intel Arc A580 (which had been rumored in recent weeks thanks to leaked benchmarks) sits in the middle of Intel’s Arc graphics card stack between the Arc A380 and the Intel Arc A750. At $179.99 (about £135/AU$260) the A580 officially comes in a bit cheaper than the A750, which has an official MSRP of $249.99 (about £190/AU$360), so it has potential for a spot on our best cheap graphics card list, though we won’t know for sure until we get one in for review.

There is no Limited Edition reference card like there was for the Intel Arc A770 and Intel Arc A750, so you’ll have to get the A580 through a third-party manufacturer. The three companies Intel cites in its press release announcing the card include ASRock, Gunnir, and Sparkle, but it’s not clear if Acer is also releasing an A580. 

Acer has released A770 and A750 cards, so an A580 card might be in the works. We’ve reached out to Acer for comment and will update this page if and when we hear back.

News about an imminent release of the Intel Arc A580 has been swirling for a few weeks now and benchmarks at least gave us an inkling that something was in the offing, even if Intel itself was tight-lipped about it.

Intel told TechRadar that the delay in its release was down to making sure the Arc team had enough time to fix driver issues following the launch of the A700-series cards before adding another product to the stack.

“Since we introduced the Intel Arc A770 and A750 products last year, our teams were focused on improving the gaming experience with those products before introducing new ones,” an Intel spokesperson said. “Now that we have greatly improved our drivers and legacy API performance, the time is right to fill out the Intel Arc discrete graphics family with a compelling option that offers advanced 1080p gaming with modern features and the most complete media engine in the segment.”

We’re still in the process of securing our own unit for review, so we can’t say for certain how close the performance is to the A750, but the specs for the two cards are pretty close, and our friends over at Tom’s Hardware reviewed the card this week and found its performance to be fairly close to the A750, which does complicate the market position of this card.

A truly budget offering from Intel?

As many have noted already, the Intel Arc A580 is very close in current discount price  to the Intel Arc A750, something that is only going to become more of an issue as we head into the holiday season and Black Friday graphics card deals pick up in earnest.

And, since the A750 is more powerful by virtue of four additional compute units, plenty of people are going to buy the A750 over the A580, which will definitely cannibalize the A580’s sales.

Which means the price on the A580 is going to come down very fast. It’s more than likely that the A580 will start selling around the $150 mark sooner rather than later, which puts it much cheaper than the AMD RX 6650 XT and RX 7600.

And while those two cards are among the best graphics cards for budget and 1080p gaming, the A580 has a real chance to be the true budget graphics card champion if its price comes down by about 17%, which is almost a guarantee given the current state of the market.

We won’t know until we get the card in ourselves, but the Arc A580 is already off to a solid start before you even slot it into your PC.