https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1869297-REG/intel_31p06hb0ba_arc_b580_limited_edition.html
Found this for sale and wondered if it was “worth it”
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Its priced just about right. Its equivalent to an AMD 7600 and a bit better than an Nvidia 4060. I know the drivers are better than what they were, but I’m still not convinced that Intel cards are ready for gaming in primetime yet. I don’t normally recommend them to people for gaming.
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Intel’s Arc series of video cards are strong contenders for users who primarily do encoding work - Adobe Premiere or OBS for example. They punch above their weight for video encoding, and if you edit videos to upload to YouTube for example, they’re a great choice. In gaming, they also perform similarly to an RTX 4060, so while they’re not an amazing value for gaming alone, if you do any encoding work, they’re phenomenal.
If you are just looking for a gaming card, the only other option in this price tier brand-new is NVIDIA’s new RTX 5050, which comes with a paltry 8GB VRAM buffer and suffers as a result. It also performs quite similarly to the B580 overall in gaming.
TL;DR, there aren’t actually many cards “worth it” in the $249 price category; there’s a LOT more performance to be had if you can step up to the $349-399 price range and grab a 16GB Radeon RX 9060 XT. If that much money is not an option, the 8GB model of the Radeon RX 9060 XT is usually available below its $299 MSRP, and will handily outperform the B580 in gaming as long as you work within the limits of its VRAM buffer.
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Thanks guys for your input. Today I learned about video encoding. that’s craaaazy