So about the Arc a380...

[Host-in-the-Shell]

Hey guys, I recently upgraded my server from an old laptop to a computer I was using for some retro gaming for less than 6 months until I decided to repurpose it. It has a radeon 520 2gb gpu which works for me but has no HA support, and I wanted something better for remote transcoding. I mean it works alright when just 1 person is transcoding but 2 starts to tax on the CPU (a ryzen 3 3100).

So I managed to snag an intel a380 at a very decent price to replace it but... I'm using Debian 12, which is in kernel 6.1 at the moment. I know Kernel 6.2 is what I need... but, will it even work with 6.1 or should I just wait until 6.2 lands on backports?

Thanks in advance.

[TheDreadPirate]

It can't hurt to try. If it doesn't work you can always restart and boot back into the 6.1 kernel and remote 6.2.

[Host-in-the-Shell]

So I'm guessing that's a "no" for it working at all with 6.1? Sorry if it's a dumb question, but I'm not that familiar with intel arc GPUs.

I could compile the 6.2 kernel but is it worth the hassle? Might as well just wait until I can install it from the backports repository.

EDIT: I found a temporary solution that works for me. I haven't been gaming much on my main rig, since I'm currently going through my backlog of Switch games that I own; so I swapped the RX 6700XT on my main machine that runs Arch (and kernel 6.4.1) for the arc a380, and put the AMD card on the server. I'll just keep it like that until kernel 6.2 is available on backports for Debian 12, then switch them back as they were before.

[Host-in-the-Shell]

I'm replying to my own thread again instead of making another edit to my previous post just to let anybody know out there that if you're considering getting an Arc A380 for your jellyfin server, it's totally worth it.

I'm taken aback by the sheer quality of the encodes, and now transcoded playback looks phenomenal. Hell, their implementation of VPP Tone mapping looks fantastic to me. Granted I'm not an expert on colors, but it seems almost indistinguishable to me to the way my 4k TV applies HDR to video.

I did had to jump through some hoops to get it working, since my server is currently on Debian 12 like I mentioned before. What I did was pull kernel 6.3.7 from Sid and the intel-opencl-icd package. EDIT: Actually, that wasn't needed, as they are the same in Bookworm and Sid; so just reinstalled from Bookworm now. All is needed is the kernel. I know, I know... "Don't break Debian" but I made a full system image backup before doing any of those changes, which I backed up to three different devices in case anything goes wrong. Even if things break beyond repair on the OS side, it  doesn't really matter, since I'm only hosting jellyfin and pi-hole in that system, so nothing critical. All my important stuff like nextcloud, my website and git repository are all on a separate box where I would never pull anything like this.

I also had to update the motherboard's BIOS in order to get resizable bar working for the gpu, and had to pull firmwares from the Linux repository directly Pull firmwares from Linux repository directly as per jellyfin's documentation, since newer intel hardware requires that.

EDIT 2: I also forgot that you have to configure ASPM on the motherboard's BIOS, which now I've done. D'oh.

But by God, was it all worth it. The speed, great price and functionality alone are fantastic perks, but it's the quality of the playback, particularly when transcoding, that steals the show.

If you don't want to jump through hoops like I did, you can always install Ubuntu Server 23.04 (in the alternative downloads section); it comes with kernel 6.2 out of the box and they advertise arc support specifically.

[TheDreadPirate]

Intel has been knocking it out of the park with QSV for years. Even my old Intel J4205 transcodes H265->H264 with shockingly good quality, even at lower bit rates.

The fact that Intel has managed to significantly improve an already great encoder/decoder has seriously tempted me to upgrade my server. But would require a full platform upgrade.

Does the A310 has the same QSV implementation?

Edit: Is the A310 not available outside of SI's?

[Host-in-the-Shell]

Unfortunately I'm brand new to Arc gpus so I'm not very knowledgeable yet. I went with an Asrock Intel Arc A380 Challenger ITX 6GB OC, because it seems perfect to serve video exclusively in a server paired along with the reduced power consumption. I've been trying to find a spec sheet online that mentions anything about its QSV implementation to no avail.

Anyway, here's the product page with the specs. I got it at a local computer store for about 140 something. I think it was money well spent.

[KGT1]

Just wanted to chip in with another setup possibility with the a380 and how I currently do it.

I have a single server with the a380 in it running Proxmox.
Its running 2 vms 1 for jellyfin and one for the transcoding vm.
The a380 is setup with pci passthrough to the transcoding vm which is running arch linux with latest intel drivers for the most features available. Otherwise its specced low with just 2gb ram.
Also it hast the latest jellyfin-ffmpeg installed, which is in the aur.

Then you can setup the Jellyfin VM with whatever kernel and linux flavour you want, just be sure to setup rffmpeg to the transcoding VM.

[CharlieMurphy]

I also had to update the motherboard's BIOS in order to get resizable bar working for the gpu, and had to pull firmwares from the Linux repository directly as per jellyfin's documentation, since newer intel hardware requires that.

EDIT 2: I also forgot that you have to configure ASPM on the motherboard's BIOS, which now I've done. D'oh.

I know that it's common knowledge that ARC needs reBAR for maximum general rendering performance, but I've seen mixed feedback about encoding/decoding. Do you have anything to say about it? Did you get a chance to test encoding without reBAR enabled? Any chance you could try it out for us if not?
It would be huge for older media servers if the performance hit in that particular workload were small without reBAR. Right now I just software transcode on an old Xeon so the power savings would be huge if A380 could handle it without resizable bar.
Also what's the deal with ASPM settings?

Thanks for sharing what you have already!

[Host-in-the-Shell]

I did test it without resizable bar, as I ran it like that for a few days at first. I can say the quality as well as performance certainly improved with it on. A noticeable difference was with tone mapping which looked a little drab and washed out when I ran the card out of the box. There was also some artifacting or white dots but the BIOS update could have fixed that instead of the other stuff. With it on I see about 10-15% usage on my cpu (ryzen 3 3100) when somebody transcodes remotely and it can handle the 4 people that connect to it on my server without issue. Without it there is far more cpu usage but I don't remember the specific amount. Unfortunately I cannot bring down my server at the moment because it would be disruptive for several of my self hosted services and to the people who use my media server. If you don't have to service several users, I think the A380 can transcode just fine without resizable bar and the visual hit is not that bad, at least IMO.

EDIT: There's also the posibility that the BIOS updates helped with performance and stability in general; keep in mind I haven't retested the card after updating the BIOS.

As for ASPM, there is more information you can read about here. That only details how to get it working on Windows, however, and since I'm using Linux, I had to configure it through the BIOS settings.

I've attached a screenshot of my current playback settings so I don't have to go over each one in case you'd want to know.

EDIT2: I forgot to mention that in terms of power consumption and energy efficiency, enabling resizable bar didn't really made much difference in terms of increased consumption. Before I was running a really underpowered laptop for my media server that I regulated and optimized using TLP, so I always expected to pay a higher electrical bill with the new server, but to my amazement my bill increased by only 1-2 US dollars at the end of the month. I'd call that a win.

[bitmap]

Well this is a little old, but I have an A380 coming in a few days and it might be a week or two before I can install it since I'll need to do a full OS rebuild, but I'll post some stats. I've already completed two full series AV1 encodes with only CPU using a few different tools and I've been really impressed with the results. I'll be interested to see the performance within Jellyfin for transcoding, although since I'm running an i7-13700K it works pretty well all on its own.