Question Thoughts about moving from a RTX2060 Super to an ARC A750?

[AnitaPeterson]

Hi folks!

I am curious to hear your thoughts about the scenario described in the title. I recently acquired a brand-new A750 for a good price (at least here in Canada!), so I'd like to see how it performs.
Most reviews and comparison sites suggest the two cards are quite similar in both gaming and multimedia playback, so it's more of a sidestep than an upgrade.

But with the Intel card, I can stretch out the limits of the current hardware.

The motherboard is an x570, so it should have both PCIe 4 and resizable bar.
(Right now the computer runs the 2060 Super on PCIe 3.0).


Is it it worth doing the GPU switch? I would assume it requires nothing more elaborate than uninstalling the drivers (perhaps via DDU), removing the old GPU and installing the new card with the very latest Intel drivers. Any surprises I should expect? Would Windows freak out if I change PCIe speed and enable resizable bar?

 

[Tech Junky]

Is it it worth doing the GPU switch? I would assume it requires nothing more elaborate than uninstalling the drivers (perhaps via DDU), removing the old GPU and installing the new card with the very latest Intel drivers. Any surprises I should expect? Would Windows freak out if I change he PCIe speed and enable resizable bar?

Well, you bought it for a reason right? No use in letting it just sit there and collect dust for ~$300 worth of GPU.

DDU is your best bet and no windows doesn't care if you swap the GPU as it will simply install generic drivers until you update them.

I've been contemplating adding one of the ARC line with my recent AMD rebuild for running Plex conversions through it instead of the CPU. I've been keeping an eye on ARC though since it was announced to see what kind of market reception it got and of course there are haters but, from a HW standpoint it's starting off better than some current market players. Though performance for Intel's top tier offerings hit the middle tier for existing cards. Not a big deal as at the time of release prices were sky high 3X+ the cost of the lateral option from N/A.

Right now I'm debating whether to bite the bullet on any GPU but, considering the A380 vs RTX3050 just for Plex use. $100 v $200. Keep thumbing through the different forums for results from either camp on converting media. The loss of QS moving from Intel to AMD has an impact on the speed of conversion and I knew it coming into the rebuild but, that wasn't my primary reason for doing it.

Anyway.... there's another thread here for the A750 and gaming testing as well w/ some hints on things to change to make different titles work as well. It's been positive w/ some quirks of course but IIRC he's over 80 titles into it now.

 

[AnitaPeterson]

Well, here's my update... The move was relatively smooth: using DDU really ensured no glitches were present after I changed the hardware. Resizable Bar and PCIE 4.0 are enabled in BIOS.

It feels more and more like a sidegrade for gaming : it works beautifully, but I think the card is running hotter and louder than the 2060Super it replaced.

Also, I can't use Topaz video AI for upscaling with the GPU (it will see the GPU in the system, but all the calculations are still done on the CPU if a process is started.)
Along the same lines, I find that DXVA can still be used in MadVR, so that's encouraging.
I also completely lost every hardware encoding option in Handbrake. And I did upgrade to the latest program version.
OBS is also affected, but at least it retains the QSV hardware encoding option.

All in all, it's a downgrade for video encoding purposes. Disappointing, to say the least.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Thanks for the additional perspective on the video encoding front. I know @DAPUNISHER rather likes his card for gaming purposes, but we don't really have a huge amount of real world data on non-gaming usage.

So what's the plan, going back to the 2060S or going to stick it out with the A750? Maybe put it in a secondary build?

 

[AnitaPeterson]

I am not hurting for lack of video encoding, so for the moment I'll leave it as it is.
But if this were the only workhorse PC in the house, the loss of hardware encoding functions would feel catastrophic.

 

[Hans Gruber]

The Arc A580 is out. They lowered the prices of the A750 Sparkle Cards to $189 and $199 for the 2x and 3x fan version. Other manufacturers may follow. The Arc Alchemist refresh is the 5nm version of ARC that has been on their roadmap for the end of 2023. If Intel releases the refresh, figure 20% power reduction and probably 5% improvement on performance.

Nvidia is really top notch on their drivers. Going to ARC will feel a little choppy. Not refined but not buttery smooth like the Nvidia experience. That's not to say that ARC isn't making huge strides, it just takes time. A single monitor setup would be good for ARC. Dual or triple monitor setups are not there yet.

Here is a link to the Arc A580 card. That's probably the card Dapunisher should/have wanted instead of the A380. He also has the A750 which is where the value is. It's like chopping down a tree. Eventually, Intel will get there and AMD should be very worried.

Intel Arc A580 Review: New Budget Contender

One year after the A750 and A770, Arc A580 finally arrives.

www.tomshardware.com

 

[igor_kavinski]

But if this were the only workhorse PC in the house, the loss of hardware encoding functions would feel catastrophic.

Two cards in the same PC work fine too, as long as you have a spare PCIe slot.

 

[Tech Junky]

@AnitaPeterson

Assuming you're running it on Windows? I'm planning on an A380 for transcoding in Linux as I just switched to AMD for the entire build and already miss the QSV of my 12700K. Running everything off the CPU just seems so ancient on the AMD front. Figure the extra $100 for a GPU and getting some time back in trade makes up for the loss of Intel.

There are some quirks about QSV / Arc though especially with HB. The nightly version apparently is where it's at in terms of HW AC. I've been rummaging around trying to dot I's and cross T's before pulling the trigger and found even the 380 vs 750/770 perform the same in terms of FPS when it comes to media at least.

I did notice the 580 / A60 Pro coming out soon or in the case of the 580 already up for sale. While it's enticing to overbuild, the price for 8GB isn't all that great for the 580 being $10 less than the 750.

Since moving my conversions to the server though I've been playing with different SW options... Tdarr / HBBatchBeast / FastFlix (FFmpeg) and a few others trying to find a good all around conversion method. FF seems to be decent enough though it's a bit quirky to setup jobs vs saving profiles in HB. HBB tends to be a little greedy and runs 4 parallel jobs at the same time maxing out the CPU. Trying to find the best for TV vs Movies though to not strip out DV in the process on the movies seems to be the hurdle though FF seems to achieve it more consistently.

I have some doubts moving to the ACM-G10/11/12 will make any processing differences though. The G2 though is supposed to be the middle ground though when it comes to the count of what matters and 12GB vs the 6/8/16 already showing up. Intel has managed to make a bit of a mess like USB with this cadence / specs mashup. Of course BMG is tempting to wait for but, that seems to be about 6 months out right now.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I am not hurting for lack of video encoding, so for the moment I'll leave it as it is.
But if this were the only workhorse PC in the house, the loss of hardware encoding functions would feel catastrophic.

Best results I have seen are with Davinci Resolve, where ARC seems to be excellent.

Something is wrong with your handbrake config, it should be working. Under settings there should be a box for hardware encoding or QSV that needs to be checked. Many users on the reddit sub having great results. On linux av1_sqv I think is the correct one. I haven't done anything but daily driver and gaming on my ARC cards. I may try some handbrake on blurays though. I'll update my thread if I do. It'll be on win11 pro.

As to a side grade to a 2060 super for gaming; that sounds about right. The super was a $400 card, so a presently sub $200 card that released 3yrs after the super matching it ain't too shabby. I'd say the ray tracing is superior to the 20 series though.

 

[AnitaPeterson]

[...] Something is wrong with your handbrake config, it should be working. Under settings there should be a box for hardware encoding or QSV that needs to be checked. Many users on the reddit sub having great results.

That was my understanding as well... But nothing I set up in Handbrake's options will convince it to show non-greyed-out hardware encoding options. Yes, it's Windows.

 

[Tech Junky]

A380

Well I ordered it and will have it tomorrow to play with settings and boost performance.

@AnitaPeterson one thing comes to mind is wsl and piping the command via the CLI. Doesn't take much to setup and should unlock the features for the card. Only thing is the kernel might need an update and I'm not sure how WSL will handle that compared to bare metal or a VM.

 

[Tech Junky]

@AnitaPeterson

Got the 380 up and running after figuring out I have to use the 8-pin PSU connector vs just PCIE power being supplied. I thought it would be working since it messed with my network numbering upon installing / booting which is normal when I change PCI # of devices. But, it didn't output anything on a query of VGA and yeah... so, plugged in the additional power and it shows up. Of course the programs being used aren't quite intuitive to find the new profiles being enabled with the GPU being installed. Double checked all the modules / reverted some prep work I did and went back to the intel PPA list of modules. Rebooted a couple of times... which leads to another issue outside the scope of this.

So, using HB / 10bit Intel QSV I'm getting 65FPS on a 4K / DV conversion which is a substantial improvement from the AMD CPU only
IIRC I converted another file the other day of similar size/options and it took 6+ hours
This particular file is only taking 45 minutes. A bit disappointed the offload to GPU didn't drop the CPU utilization during conversion though. However, the trade off of converting these files reduced to 1/8 of the time will reduce the power consumption.

Still trying to figure out how to activate hwaccel in FFlix for comparison w/ FFmpeg in terms of speed to convert.

Next is to automate things a bit again w/ Tdarr using the GPU for repeatable things like OTA recordings that happen daily instead of queueing up things manually.

Of course Amazon finally dropped the price to $99 on another model so, went ahead and ordered that to save $20 and will send this ASRock one back when that arrives Friday. The Sparkle one doesn't have a PSU requirement. Picked up a longer TB4 cable for the discount @ $22 which are normally about $50 due to an overstock.

 

[Tech Junky]

Just ran a couple of 720p files through HB and they were hitting 800-850 FPS and finished in 1:15/file. Just used the h265.qsv setting on them. Not bad for a $100 card. Mind you Intel CPU's tend to do fairly well on their own with QSV but, for AMD systems and older Intel systems this is a pretty good option and no need to go with a higher priced model as they all seem to hit the same mark when it comes to transcodes.

To put this into perspective when I was running these through my laptop w/ a RTX3060 using a different program they would probably take 5-7 minutes per file. I was pondering the idea of getting / using a RTX4060 though for this same task since there's more "plugins" for NVENC but, why pay 3X more? Just need to spend a little more time tweaking things and figure out how to get FFMPEG to bind to the GPU to speed things up w/o using CLI to do it w/o a script to find / convert files.