It would be overkill if it was run at Gen 5.0 speed but apparently, this wasn’t the reason why Intel enabled Gen 4.0. Some rumors suggest that Gen 5.0 will be enabled later but there isn’t any reliable information that proves this.
Battlemage Arc B580 contains gold fingers with PCI-E Gen 5.0 compliance but doesn’t actually unlock the Gen 5.0 speeds
Intel was reportedly the first of the three major GPU manufacturers to bring PCI-Express Gen 5.0 interface in their latest GPUs, i.e., the Battlemage. It did, but it doesn’t actually work on the Arc Battlemage discrete GPUs as we have just seen from the reviews. The card instead runs at Gen 4.0 speeds, which is clearly mentioned even on the Arc B580’s official specs as it boasts a PCI-E 4.0 x8 interface.
However, the interface seems to be PCI-E 5.0 in reality, with pin layout, materials, and electrical tolerances indicating the same. This means, technically the GPU gold fingers are compatible with PCI-E 5.0 slots but can not operate at Gen 5.0 speed, which goes up to 32 GT/s compared to 16 GT/s through the PCI-E 4.0 interface.
Apparently, Intel did originally plan to equip the Arc B580 with Gen 5.0 speeds but it is said that they had to skip this due to a ‘Bug’ (via @SquashBionic). A bug could be due to various reasons and would have limited the hardware capabilities to reach the desired Gen 5.0 speeds. We don’t know the exact nature of this bug but I think even if Intel had managed to fix this before the launch, which happened yesterday, it would have made no difference.
The Arc B580 isn’t powerful enough to operate at Gen 5.0 bandwidth and is better off with Gen 4.0. Hence, even if Intel enables it later, we wouldn’t possibly see any noticeable changes in the Arc B580’s performance. Perhaps, we could see the Gen 5.0 interface in full action on the upper mid-range Battlemage GPUs if Intel hasn’t canceled them.
At the moment, the Arc B580 seems to doing well against the RTX 4060 and RX 7600 but we will see how the competition turns out when NVIDIA launches its RTX 5060 and 5050 GPU, which both are rumored to feature 8 GB VRAM. If this comes out to be true, the B580 may have the upper hand in some cases due to 12 GB VRAM.
