Two Budget GPUs, One Brutal Ray Tracing Test
AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT and Intel’s Arc B580 occupy the same general price territory, both targeting gamers who want solid 1080p performance without spending north of $300. On paper, they compete for the same buyer. In ray tracing workloads specifically, though, the gap between them tells a more complicated story than the spec sheets suggest.
Ray tracing at 1080p has become the real proving ground for mid-range GPUs in 2025.
The RX 9060 XT launches on AMD’s RDNA 4 architecture, which brought meaningful improvements to ray tracing acceleration compared to RDNA 3. The Arc B580, built on Intel’s Xe2 architecture, launched in late 2024 and immediately impressed reviewers with ray tracing performance that punched well above its price point. Putting these two head-to-head at 1080p across several ray tracing-heavy titles reveals which architecture actually delivers when the workload gets demanding.
Architecture and Ray Tracing Hardware
The RX 9060 XT brings AMD’s second-generation ray accelerators from RDNA 4, the same architecture found in the higher-end RX 9070 series. Each compute unit now handles ray-box and ray-triangle intersection tests more efficiently than before, and AMD has substantially increased the number of ray accelerators per CU compared to RDNA 3. The 9060 XT ships with 32 compute units, which gives it a respectable ray tracing budget for a card at this price.
Intel’s Arc B580 uses Xe2 ray tracing units that Intel claims are significantly faster per unit than those in the original Arc A-series. The B580 carries 20 Xe-cores, each with dedicated ray tracing hardware. What Intel lacks in raw unit count, it attempts to offset through architectural efficiency and its XeSS upscaling solution, which handles ray traced games particularly well by reconstructing detail at higher resolutions from a lower internal render target. The B580 also benefits from 12GB of GDDR6 memory versus the 9060 XT’s 16GB – a surprising flip where the cheaper card (in some configurations) carries more VRAM, though at 1080p, 12GB is rarely a constraint for any title available today.
Both cards support DirectX 12 Ultimate and Vulkan ray tracing extensions, so there are no compatibility gaps across the titles tested. The more relevant question is raw throughput when a game throws heavy BVH traversal, ambient occlusion, reflections, and global illumination at the GPU simultaneously – which is exactly what the test suite covers.
1080p Ray Tracing Performance Across Key Titles
In Cyberpunk 2077 with Ray Tracing: Ultra settings and no upscaling, the RX 9060 XT pulls ahead of the Arc B580 by a meaningful margin – roughly in the range of 15 to 20 percent at 1080p. Cyberpunk’s path tracing mode (Overdrive) makes the gap wider still, with the 9060 XT sustaining higher average frame rates while the B580 dips harder during complex lighting scenes with lots of neon and wet surfaces. This tracks with RDNA 4’s improved handling of incoherent ray workloads, which path tracing produces in abundance.
Alan Wake 2 tells a different story. Intel’s Xe2 handles the game’s aggressive use of ray traced reflections and global illumination more gracefully than expected, and the B580 sits within 10 percent of the 9060 XT for most of the game’s outdoor and indoor sequences. When both cards run their respective upscaling solutions – XeSS on the B580 and FSR 4 on the 9060 XT – the performance gap narrows further, and image quality differences become the more meaningful comparison. FSR 4 on RDNA 4 has been widely praised for its sharpness and stability, and it shows here. Control with full ray tracing enabled on both cards shows the B580 and 9060 XT trading blows depending on the scene, with neither card establishing a consistent lead beyond a few frames per second. For an older title with ray tracing baked into its core rendering pipeline, both GPUs handle it comfortably at 1080p with upscaling engaged.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, which uses MachineGames’ id Tech engine with heavy ray tracing, favors the RX 9060 XT more decisively. The game’s dense indoor environments with complex shadow casting push the B580 into occasional frame dips that the 9060 XT avoids more consistently. That said, the B580 remains playable throughout – this is not a situation where one card fails the test, more that the 9060 XT has a higher floor under load. For anyone interested in how higher-end AMD hardware handles similar workloads, the Radeon RX 9070 XT vs RTX 5070 Ti 4K ray tracing comparison shows how RDNA 4 scales up the stack.
Power, Thermals, and Driver Stability
The RX 9060 XT runs at a higher TDP than the Arc B580, which is worth factoring into a build budget beyond the GPU sticker price. The B580 is notably power-efficient for its performance level, drawing less under full ray tracing load while still delivering competitive frame rates. For smaller form factor builds or systems with modest power supplies, that efficiency advantage is real and not trivial.
Driver stability has historically been a sore point for Intel Arc. The B580’s launch drivers were rough in certain DX11 titles, though subsequent updates have addressed most of the early issues. AMD’s driver ecosystem is more mature, and RDNA 4 launched with fewer critical bugs than Intel’s initial Arc rollout. Neither driver situation today is dramatically different from the competition, but AMD still holds a slight reliability edge based on months of additional post-launch patching from Intel.
Thermals on both cards are reasonable for their class. The B580 reference design runs warm but not loud. Third-party 9060 XT coolers from AMD’s board partners vary, but the card generally stays within acceptable temperature ranges under sustained ray tracing loads without requiring aggressive fan curves.
Which Card Should You Buy?
If ray tracing performance is your primary benchmark for a 1080p card under $300, the RX X9060 XT wins the head-to-head more often than not – particularly in current titles that stress the pipeline hardest. The Arc B580 remains a strong buy for anyone who prioritizes power efficiency or finds it at a lower street price, and its ray tracing output in older or moderately demanding titles is genuinely impressive for what Intel charges. The real pressure on both cards now is from Nvidia’s RTX 5060 Ti, which complicates the value math at the top of this segment considerably – and which neither AMD nor Intel has found a clean answer to yet.
