Arc A310 Performance

[Build.]

Description says it all.
For context I self host a Jellyfin server on windows, and I just upgraded my server PC to an Intel Arc A310 from an Nvidia GTX 1050 2GB.

When I say I'm blown away, I mean truly blown away. I don't have any numbers from the GTX 1050 because I actually never bothered to check.
But it would chug and drop frames on a single 4K HDR transcode. It couldn't even do 1!
But with the Arc A310, when transcoding from 4K HEVC HDR 10 bit, to 4K H264 SDR 8 bit, Jellyfin is reporting a WHOPPING 150+ FPS for transcoding!

I opened 2 videos at once of the same format, and it sailed through it. With these FPS numbers, I could probably do 5 or more at once? I'm beyond impressed.

Plus, once AV1 encoding is fully supported, I'll be ready from day 1! 

Here's a screenshot from the transcoding info:




And yes I did enable resizable BAR in the BIOS. I didn't bother checking performance pre-ReBAR.


For $95 I'm so happy. I can share my media with family and friends and not worry about their experience anymore. 
If anyone is wondering the specific $95 card I got, I purchased the "ASRock Low Profile Intel ARC A310 LP 4G" It comes with a full size bracket though.

[nyanmisaka]

All cards in the Arc lineup feature the same number of MFX media engines. Therefore, for the A310 4GB, it has the same theoretical transcoding speed as the A770 16GB, but it is easier to exhaust VRAM before running out of the engine capacity.

Btw, encoding to AV1 is already supported in JF 10.9, you can try it in advance.

[Mel_Gibson_Real]

Replaced my p400 with an a310, and it runs circles around it. Even with pcie 3.0 and no resizable bar, it handles anything I can reasonable throw at it. Not sure how much is just confirmation bias but I swear H264 looks way better at lower bitrates than I would expect to notice with casual viewing. Very excited for official av1 support since most of my watchtime is at <1 Mbps.

[toytown]

All cards in the Arc lineup feature the same number of MFX media engines. Therefore, for the A310 4GB, it has the same theoretical transcoding speed as the A770 16GB, but it is easier to exhaust VRAM before running out of the engine capacity.

Yes my A380 6GB can do about 7 4K(HDR)->4K(SDR) transcodes all at the same time, but pushing it to 8 and the FPS completely collapses due to what i assume is VRAM limits.   The 4GB A310 should still be able to do about 4 or 5 no problem.

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Very excited for official av1 support since most of my watchtime is at <1 Mbps.

For the current Intel Arc cards you would be slightly better off using HEVC for transcoding than AV1, if your client supports HEVC.   The HEVC encoder on the card is just every so slightly better than the AV1 hardware encoder.

[TheDreadPirate]

Not sure how much is just confirmation bias but I swear H264 looks way better at lower bitrates than I would expect to notice with casual viewing.

It isn't confirmation bias.  QSV has been very good for a long time.  NVENC has only recently caught up in RTX 4000 cards.  So going from Pascal's NVENC to Arc QSV is a big jump in terms of quality per bit.

[Mel_Gibson_Real]

For the current Intel Arc cards you would be slightly better off using HEVC for transcoding than AV1, if your client supports HEVC.   The HEVC encoder on the card is just every so slightly better than the AV1 hardware encoder.

For me HEVC has always been annoying to deal with, some browsers report they can direct play it incorrectly (im looking at you firefox). And ive never successfully gotten jellyfin to transcode to HEVC on any platform.

I personally havent had any trouble direct playing AV1 yet. And nyanmisaka seems to be putting a lot of work into making sure it is well supported for transcoding. Though I havent tried 10.9.0 yet, Ill probably give it a shot today.

[toytown]

For me HEVC has always been annoying to deal with, some browsers report they can direct play it incorrectly (im looking at you firefox). And ive never successfully gotten jellyfin to transcode to HEVC on any platform.

I've never been able to get jellyfin to transcode to HEVC for a browser (at least chrome/edge/firefox) either.  It's a shame for my family members who watch on their computer browsers remotely and have to watch using h264, but obviously this will be solved in time with AV1.

Amazon firesticks / Nvidia shield clients do transcode to HEVC though and that's great for them with limited bandwidth.

[nyanmisaka]

In JF 10.8.x, only a few clients support request transcoding to HEVC, such as Safari, Apple clients and Android clients.

In JF 10.9 it is possible to request transcoding to HEVC and AV1 on all common browsers, such as Chrome and Edge.