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How good/bad are the Linux drivers for Intel Arc GPUs right now? (pawb.social)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Title. Been meaning to upgrade my GPU, and Intel Arcs are undercutting their AMD equivalent by quite a bit?

But like, I am not going to switch back to Windows. And I don't want to spend a lot of money on a new computer part just to learn it doesn't support my OS properly.

Now. I did search for this and found a phoronix benchmark thing -- But it's from almost a full year ago.

So.

Anyone have an Intel Arc GPU and can tell how they are doing as of now?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Yeh A380 arc really shines here. A couple of unsolicited notes if you go that route.

Ffmpeg > 6.0

VAAPI api is the winner for encoder, libsvtav1 is good too. - libaom-av1 is REALLY slow.

intel-media-sdk is needed - at least in debian, the free version in bookworm and testing repos is perfect - the non-free version mangled the files Decoder support in hardware is a thing to watch out for. (Plex+AppleTV had to have a profile set and forced on it, but that was really simple)

At the moment, I'm running three encoding streams simultaneously and it uses around 95% of the GPU BUSY stats - I don't strictly know if that's the best metric to measure against, but it is good enough for my half-arsed efforts.

Given the price I've seen the 750's on sale for, it wasn't that much of a reach to put a 750 in the server as well, but it was a physical space constraint plus once I'm finished the encoding effort, it would be way more than is ever needed for on the fly transcodes or one offs. Plus there are low profile A380 variants and it doesn't require an extra power connector*.

*Turns out the Asrock one I have does require an 8pin - but it looks like the low profile version doesn't. So maybe discount that point

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I have a pretty big case because I wanted space for a lot of hard drives. It's a lot of consumer-grade equipment from years ago.

I actually appreciate all the advice, I've got a lot more information to proceed with now. I'll probably wait for a sale and see what card I really want to get, because I could also use the machine for local game streaming in addition to the transcoding, so I might wait for a sale and get a 750.

Right now the current block is that I need to do some BIOS hacks to enable RE-BAR (which has been available since PCIe 2.0) so that the Arc card works properly, but there's a nice little guide I found that's been proven to work all the way back to Broadwell and Sandy Bridge processors.

Thanks again for the advice! I love tech, it's such a world of possibilities.