Intel's Arc graphics cards have made their first appearance in the Steam hardware survey just as I'm getting genuinely excited about the new Battlemage B580 card

Could it be that Intel's beleaguered CEO Pat Gelsinger fell on his sword too soon? For there is news just in that Intel's Arc gaming graphics cards have made their first appearance in the Steam hardware survey. Meanwhile, Intel's new Arc B580 graphics card looks like it could be genuinely exciting for gamers on a budget.

Cue much rejoicing back at Intel's Santa Clara, California HQ? Well, not quite. According to November's survey of Steam users' PC hardware, Intel Arc GPUs make up a not exactly overwhelming 0.19% of all entries.

Still, that's better than the 0.16% achieved by the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT and only just behind the 0.21% of the 7900 XT. Of course, these surveys are populated by a very wide range of cards. Even the most popular single GPU, the Nvidia RTX 3060, only makes up 5% of the survey.

Moreover, old boards like the GTX 1050 Ti, 1060 and 1650, and the RTX 2060 still rank remarkably highly. It's also unclear exactly what Arc graphics we're talking about here.

The listing simply states "Intel(R) Arc(TM) Graphics." Does that include an Arc A770 desktop card? Or could this incursion into the Steam survey be due to Intel's new Lunar Lake laptop chip, which has an integrated Arc GPU?

My best guess is that it's probably the latter. But either way, I find myself surprisingly excited by the new Arc B580 graphics card announced yesterday.

At first, I was disappointed it wasn't the rumoured RTX 4070 killer. But even a $500 GPU is pretty rich for many PC gamers. The B580, on the other hand, is yours for just $250 and gives you 12 GB and a 192-bit memory bus.

That means you won't often have to worry about running out of VRAM, which isn't something that can be said about an 8 GB RTX 4060. What's more, Intel seems to have further improved its ray tracing performance with this second-gen Battlemage GPU.

If Intel has done a decent job on its drivers, the B580 might just be the killer 1440p GPU we've all been waiting for. You can now get a decent 1440p gaming monitor for $250, and here's a similarly priced GPU to go with it.

There's much to be proven, of course, but I'm hopeful. Cautiously hopeful, that is. But hopeful all the same. Watch this space for our review of the B580 soon. And cross your fingers. And all your toes.