A real surprise – Intel Arc Pro B50 in the test and big workstation duel under 450 euros

1 - Introduction, unboxing and technical data 2 - Test system and equipment 3 - Teardown: PCB, topology and components 4 - Teardown: Cooling solution 5 - Teardown: Material analysis and ASTM TIM testing 6 - Autodesk AutoCAD 7 - Autodesk Inventor Pro 8 - PTC Creo 9 - Dassault Systèmes Solidworks 10 - Autodesk Maya 11 - SPECviewperf 15 (2025) 12 - Adobe Photoshop 26.10 13 - Adobe After Effects 2025 14 - Adobe Premiere Pro 25.41 15 - AI Benchmarks (AI Vision, Image, Text) 16 - Rendering 17 - Temperatues, clock rates, power draw and fan speed 18 - Summary and conclusion

SPEC, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, is an association of manufacturers, users and research institutes that develops benchmarks for a wide range of IT areas. SPECviewperf is the best-known tool for workstation graphics cards and focuses on viewport performance. Its special feature is that it does not run complete applications, but so-called viewsets. These are extracted scenes or traces from real programs such as Maya, Creo, CATIA or Solidworks, which then run reproducibly in a benchmark environment.

This is precisely where the ambivalence lies: because these are not complete applications, but rather cut-out workloads without ISV certification, driver developers can optimize these viewsets in a targeted manner. This often results in an exhibition race for benchmark figures. Cards shine in SPECviewperf, while they sometimes fare worse in the real full versions, as stability, compatibility and certified feature sets are required there. SPEC results are therefore useful for an overall assessment, but must always be read in relation to the real applications. And that is precisely why I have gone to so much trouble on the previous pages and put a considerable amount of effort into the software.

The entire SPECviewperf-15 run was carried out in full HD. The reason for this lies in the memory expansion: Both the AMD Radeon Pro W7500 and the NVIDIA RTX A1000 only have 8 GB of VRAM. In higher resolutions, there were failures or unusable results in individual viewsets because the scenes exceeded the available graphics memory in these cases. In order to ensure fair comparability and complete results across all ten benchmarks, the tests were therefore carried out consistently in 1920 × 1080.

3ds Max 2023 (DX11)

The 3dsmax-08 viewset is based on Autodesk 3ds Max 2023 and uses typical DCC scenes with shading and wireframes under DirectX 11. Intel Arc Pro B50 achieves 32.71 points here and dominates ahead of the Radeon Pro W7500 with 24.18 points. The RTX A1000 is lagging behind with 17.85 points. Intel thus delivers the highest scores for interactive modeling and material shading, which indicates good optimization in DX11.

Blender 3.6 LTS (OpenGL)

The blender-01 viewset represents interactive workflows in Blender 3.6 LTS with OpenGL viewport. Arc Pro B50 is ahead with 32.82 points, W7500 follows with 28.52 points, A1000 falls back to 20.56 points. Blender benefits greatly from bandwidth and efficient driver handling of many polygons, which Intel and AMD are visibly better at.

CATIA 2022 (V6 and V5)

The catia-07 viewset includes scenes from CATIA V6 2022x and elements from V5. As a result, the Radeon Pro W7500 achieves 35.71 points and is just ahead of the Arc Pro B50 with 33.92 points. NVIDIA follows with 25.31 points. CATIA is traditionally a strong field for AMD’s workstation drivers, which is once again confirmed here.

PTC Creo 9

The creo-04 viewset reflects parametric assemblies, hidden line and shading views in Creo 9. The Arc Pro B50 dominates with 101.89 points, clearly ahead of the W7500 with 76.70 points and the RTX A1000 with 69.48 points. Intel therefore has a massive advantage in this synthetic benchmark, especially in Creo, even if this is not always so clear in the real ISV benchmarks.

OpendTect 7.0.0 (Energy, OpenGL)

The energy-04 viewset is based on OpendTect 7.0.0 for seismic volume visualization. The W7500 achieves the highest score here with 47.10 points, just ahead of the Arc Pro B50 with 45.36 points. NVIDIA lags far behind with 26.09 points. AMD’s OpenGL optimizations pay off in this science-related workload.

Autodesk Maya 2025

The maya-07 viewset simulates animation and scene construction in Maya 2025 with various shading modes. Intel is clearly in the lead with 118.33 points, followed by AMD with 88.88 points and NVIDIA with 76.51 points. Intel shows the strongest OpenGL viewport performance here, which is noticeable in modeling and animation.

Chaos Enscape 4.0 (Volcano)

The enscape-01 viewset stands for architectural real-time visualization with Vulkan and ray tracing features. Arc Pro B50 scores 17.62 points, just ahead of W7500 with 16.00 points. The RTX A1000 lags behind with 12.18 points. Intel benefits from Vulkan driver quality here, but the lead is less pronounced than in Maya.

3dslicer 5.6.1 (Medical, OpenGL)

The medical-04 viewset measures the visualization of volume data in 3dslicer 5.6.1. Intel achieves 89.60 points, AMD 77.22 points and NVIDIA 51.71 points. Intel is clearly ahead here, which is relevant for medical data sets with high polygon throughput and volume rendering.

Solidworks 2024

The sw-06 viewset is based on Solidworks 2024 and shows a surprising victory for Intel: Arc Pro B50 achieves 41.12 points, the W7500 33.98 points and the A1000 32.22 points. In reality, however, Solidworks is heavily dependent on certifications, which is why these SPEC results do not reflect the lack of official support.

Unreal Engine 5.4 (DX12)

The unreal_engine-01 viewset uses DirectX 12 and modern UE5 features such as Lumen and Nanite. The Radeon Pro W7500 wins with 54.87 points, Arc Pro B50 follows with 51.95 points, while the A1000 achieves 40.22 points. AMD and Intel are close to each other, NVIDIA is weaker in comparison.

Conclusion

SPECviewperf 15 impressively demonstrates how strongly cards can shine in synthetic scenes. Intel dominates in Maya, Creo, Blender, Medical, 3ds Max and Solidworks, AMD is ahead in CATIA, OpendTect and Unreal Engine, while NVIDIA consistently lags behind. However, the results should be read with caution: In real-world full versions, ISV certifications, stability and feature coverage are the deciding factors, not raw viewport performance alone. SPEC remains a good chart, but is not the final word for productive use.