An Alluring Alchemist: Intel Arc A380 GPU Creator Performance Review

[PAGETITLE=Intel Arc A380 Performance: Encoding, Rendering & Photogrammetry][Top Ad] This is an article we've wanted to write for a while - one that introduces a third major GPU vendor that will become a regular feature in our performance testing. Since Techgage's launch in 2005, the overwhelming majority of our creator and gaming testing has revolved around AMD and NVIDIA, with the odd occasion of integrated graphics thrown in, so a third GPU maker joining our regular benchmarking feels significant. The rollout of Intel's Arc has been interesting, to say the least. While AMD and NVIDIA typically launch a new architecture with top-end SKUs first, Intel took the opposite route, and began Arc's desktop life with the $140 A380. At that price, the closest competitors are AMD's Radeon RX 6400 and NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1630. It's no secret that Intel's Arc desktop lineup should have had more models released by now, especially as the A380 launched in Asia all the way back in June. Fortunately, though, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger unveiled during his Innovation 2022 keynote yesterday that the top-end A770 would be launching on October 12, for $329. On the topic of timelines, this article should have been posted a week ago, but testing hassles (including required sanity checks and fine-tuning select tests) held it up. Those delays had nothing to do with Arc in particular, but more so the nature of how challenging it can be to get accurate, repeatable results from real-world video encoding tests. We're not kidding when we say that we sanity checked all of the video encode tests featured on this page up to four times per GPU - that's how sporadic things can be. One day, you may see one result, and the next, 10 or so seconds will be shaved off - or added on. All of that repeated testing gave us results we can feel confident in, which is especially important as we'll be building upon them for our upcoming Arc A770 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 performance looks. Intel's Arc Gaming & Creator GPU Lineup Xe Cores Render Slices GPU Clock Memory Bandwidth TDP SRP Arc A770 32 8 2.1 GHz 16/8 GB 1 560/512 GB/s 225W $329 Arc A750 28 7 2.05 GHz 8 GB 1 512 GB/s 225W $??? Arc A380 8 2 2.0 GHz 6 GB 1 186 GB/s 75W $139 Arc A310 6 2 2.0 GHz 4 GB 1 124 GB/s 75W $??? Notes 1 GDDR6 Arc AXXX = Alchemist Intel's full desktop Arc lineup, as we know it today, can be seen in the table above. What's odd to us is, is that while we expected four models in the final lineup, we never even heard of the A310 until we put digital pen to paper for this article. We're also confused as to the omission of the Arc 5 series, which we've seen reference to before. The most important thing to note above is that the A770 will come in two flavors, with the top SKU offering double the VRAM, at the same time increasing bandwidth ever-so-slightly. It's also worth noting the huge difference in TDP values between the Arc 7 and 3 models, which only feels stark because of the lack of an Arc 5 in there. Nonetheless, we could not be more eager to get this article out the door, so let's take a quick look at our test PC, and then get right into the results: Techgage Workstation Test System Processor AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (16-core; 3.4GHz) Motherboard ASRock X570 TAICHI (EFI: P4.80 03/02/2022) Memory Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro (CMW32GX4M4C3200C16) 8GB x 4 Operates at DDR4-3200 16-18-18 (1.35V) AMD Graphics AMD Radeon RX 6600 (8GB; Adrenalin 22.9.1) AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT (4GB; Adrenalin 22.9.1) Intel Graphics Intel Arc A380 (6GB; Arc 31.0.101.3430) NVIDIA Graphics NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 (12GB; GeForce 516.94) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 (8GB; GeForce 516.94) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 (6GB; GeForce 516.94) Audio Onboard Storage Samsung 500GB SSD (SATA) (x3) Power Supply Corsair RM850X Chassis Fractal Design Define C Mid-Tower Cooling Corsair Hydro H100i PRO RGB 240mm AIO Et cetera Windows 11 Pro build 22000 (22H1) AMD chipset driver 4.08.09.2337 All product links in this table are affiliated, and help support our work. Please note that while the best competition for Intel's Arc A380 is AMD's Radeon RX 6400 and NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1630, we don't have either, so we're using the next-best-thing we could find: Radeon RX 6500 XT and GeForce GTX 1660. Both of those hover around the $200 price point, so the gap is larger than we'd like, but it will still be interesting to see how Arc holds up. Encoding Performance. From the get-go, there is a lot to talk about. As alluded to earlier, video encode testing is challenging, at least if we're using real-world projects. Transcode testing is much more reliable, as real-world projects have a number of variables; the entire encode process won't hit the GPU hard like 3D rendering would. The second project among the tests above includes effects we know to be GPU-heavy, and thus it scales much differently. That said, Intel is off to a great start here with the lighter of the two tests, placing ahead of the entire tested lineup. When heavier effects are involved, the scaling changes dramatically, with the Arc card falling to the back - but it's hard to discount it, because it doesn't fall that far behind the much more expensive GTX 1660. Note that the Radeon RX 6500 failed this test because it lacks an accelerated encoder; it couldn't even begin either of the processes. Transcode work is a little different - at least when it involves AVC and HEVC decoding: With these transcode tests, we can see clear limitations of the Radeon RX 6500 XT. With no dedicated accelerated encoder, it falls well behind the tested stack in the AVC and HEVC transcode tests, and fails when RED and ProRes is involved. This makes one of Arc's best features shine through nicely: all models have the same encoding capabilities. It's quite something to see a $140 GPU clear all of these tests without issue, and the $200 AMD competitor failing most of them. Let's see how Arc fares in other encode tests: As much as we've loved testing VEGAS Pro over the years, we admit that the current state of the software (at least version 19) has made benchmarking difficult. When the software first launched, we encountered such bizarre scaling, that we gave up on testing, and never ended up returning to it. With VP20 out, we're planning to dig into that soon, and hope to see more realistic scaling across-the-board. That aside, one result in the graph above definitely stands out above the rest. It appears that Intel's HEVC encoder is seriously good. We might owe part of this extreme delta to the fact that the software needs better optimizations for all vendors, but after four rounds of testing/retesting, these results all held. Intel just cleans house here. It even manages to keep up with the RTX 3060 in the Median project, which involves lots of GPU usage - it's almost akin to rendering. Adding to the strange behavior of VEGAS Pro, while Radeon is indeed supported, we had to chalk those runs up as a fail, as the end result was corrupt. The coloring was skewed in each project, with a blue hue in one scene turning stark orange in the final encode. We're not sure how to explain this, but we hope VP20 will give us a better experience. If not, we'll work with the developers to figure out what's going on. One piece of software Intel's seemed quite jazzed about when talking about Arc is HandBrake, and... it's not hard to see why: The latest stable version of HandBrake, 1.5.1, does not include support for Arc (as it released earlier this year), so for full support, you'll need to grab the latest nightly build. There's not much to be said here that's not glaringly obvious. Intel continues to shine in HEVC encoding, leaping far ahead of the entire rest of the stack. Radeon has been having a rough go this entire article so far, and the reason for its complete omission in the HandBrake test is that the current nightly build refused to allow us to use its VCE/VCN acceleration. Radeon does work in the stable version, but since additional testing showed that the numbers for the other vendors changed between both, we didn't feel confident mixing the results together. Let's wrap up our encoding look with the BRAW Speed Test: BRAW encoding uses the GPU to great effect, so the scaling we see here is pretty much expected. While seeing the A380 near the bottom might seem lackluster, let's not forget the fact that it's a $140 GPU, and it's straight-up dominated the $200 RX 6500 XT across all of our encode tests. Intel has packed an enormous amount of encoding value into the Arc A380. On the topic of resultant encode quality, we performed A-B image comparison between vendors in all of our encoded scenes, and to the naked eye, they all appeared even (different frames looked a pinch better from each vendor) . We're not yet familiar with how to run analysis on resulting video files to produce a quality or efficiency score, but that's something we plan to explore for forthcoming articles. We'd be remiss to leave out the fact that one thing that makes Arc really stand out (at least for now) is its included AV1 encoder. This is a new file format that looks to replace AVC in time, as it's much more efficient (especially when streaming). As mentioned above, we don't do quality analysis of video encodes yet, or else we would have run some AV1 comparison tests. With NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce series also adding in an AV1 encoder, we're due to get down to business with that format soon. Rendering Performance. To the chagrin of AMD and Intel, we're sure, those who care about strong Blender performance are going to have to go the NVIDIA route. The integration of the OptiX API propels even low-end RTX GPUs ahead of higher-end competition, as we've seen time and time again in our quarterly deep-dive. It's not just with rendering that NVIDIA dominates, but even viewport interactions. That said, despite NVIDIA dominating in Blender so much, we regularly see folks seek out competitor cards anyway, because their needs are light, and they feel...

An Alluring Alchemist: Intel Arc A380 GPU Creator Performance Review

Rob Williams