Intro
I took a leap of faith by buying an Intel Alchemist series GPU, even after countless people online advised against purchasing one if the target system doesn’t support Resizable BAR. Still, AV1 at this price point felt too compelling to pass up, even if it meant subpar graphical performance. My main intent was transcoding media, so I didn’t think I would mind.
I didn’t expect much, but the Intel Arc A380 performed surprisingly well for my needs, showing results close to a GTX 1650. Best of all, converting my media to AV1 has already saved over 9TB of storage space (more than a 50% reduction in space usage).
In this blog, I’ll share my results.
System specs
The GPU is passed through to my Plex VM, which has the following configuration:
- 16 cores, Xeon Gold 6126
- 16GiB of RAM
- Ubuntu 24.04.2
- Kernel 6.8.0-54-generic
- Mesa 25.0.0 (Kisak’s PPA)
- Vulkan 1.4.305
It is worth noting that the host has 4G decoding enabled.
Graphics Performance
I was originally planning to use Unigine benchmarking tools but quickly realized they lack of Vulkan support. I then turned to GravityMark, a very capable benchmarking tool with Vulkan support. There aren’t many submissions to GravityMark, so these results should be taken with caution. Click here to view the GravityMark leaderboard.
OpenGL performance for this card is abysmal. I don’t know if its due to my setup, but it is significantly worse than Vulkan. I did not find many relevant results from GravityMark, so I have only compared it against a GTX 1070.
Vulkan on the other hand, performed great. The Intel Arc A380 seems to sit between an AMD RX 580 and a GTX 1650 –not too bad.
Transcoding Performance
Transcoding using HandBrake with the QSV profile wasn’t very performant. A 4K test movie averaged about 34FPS.
On the other hand, Plex transcoding performance was great. On avg, I achieved about 5x the speed on a 4K-to-4K conversion, 7x on a 4K-to-1080p conversion and 13x on a 1080p-to-1080p conversion. This leaves plenty of room for devices that can’t yet play AV1 directly. The results are shown below.
AI Performance
For AI testing, I used an ollama version compiled with a Vulkan backend, built using this guide. You can find my results below.
The first prompt was a simple “hello”.
The second prompt was “write me a 300 word short story”.
For the third prompt, I pasted a different short story and asked it comprehension questions.
End
The Intel Arc A380 hasn’t disappointed me, even with ReBAR disabled. I’m also able to stream games through Sunshine and play at a comfortable framerate. I’d recommend anyone looking to get AV1 support at a reasonable price to still consider purchasing an Intel Arc GPU, even if your motherboard doesn’t support ReBAR.
Keep in mind that synthetic benchmarks rarely reflect real-world usage.