Intel arc on older platforms

[bal723]

I have an Chinese lga 2011 motherboard with a good old 6 core xeon 2630L v2 cpu,

and this week I saw msrp of arc a310 - 99$

but I am worried about compatibility of my system, on intel's site it says that it might cause problems,

should i take the risk?

[DoctorNick]

7 minutes ago, bal723 said:

I have an Chinese lga 2011 motherboard with a good old 6 core xeon 2630L v2 cpu,

and this week I saw msrp of arc a310 - 99$

but I am worried about compatibility of my system, on intel's site it says that it might cause problems,

should i take the risk?

I don't see why this wouldn't work, it uses a normal PCI-e interface, I just don't understand why you want it?

[bal723]

6 minutes ago, DoctorNick said:

I don't see why this wouldn't work, it uses a normal PCI-e interface, I just don't understand why you want it?

it has rt cores and intel dlss analog, plus I wanted mini pc build with it

[mariushm]

Apparently the way they made the ARC cards, they're quite sensitive to lack of PCI-e Resizable BAR so they won't work very well with such old cpu / motherboard. 

Also, as far as I saw from GamersNexus review, the drivers have problems and you get quite high frame times periodically (feels like fps drops to 10-20fps every few seconds, something like that). See the video, at around 5:30 you see some games get up to 40% more fps just with Resizable BAR enable

 

Overall I'd say it's not worth it at that price, maybe look for a new RX 6400 / RX 6500 or a used RX 470 / RX 480 / RX 570 / RX 580 or a 1060 from nVidia even if it costs 20-50$ more.

 

RX 4xx / RX 5xx would be better because they have full pci-e x16, while this ARC310 is only pci-e x8 if my memory is correct and RX 6400 / 6500 are pci-e 4.0 x4 so they'll have a bit of performance loss on motherboards that don't do pci-e 4.0

 

While it has RT cores and DLSS , it's the lowest end ARC card  ... it's in the name, 310 ... so it's super slow. Whatever small amount of RT cores are there, aren't enough to render something 

 

He's testing A380 which is much more capable than Arc A310 and it's still slow, the A380 sits somewhere between a GTX 1050Ti and a RX6400 which is a bit slower than a RX 580 in most games (but the RX6400 being newer uses much less power and is available in low-profile models) , so probably even a RX 470/ RX 570 will be better than A380, not to mention A310. 

 

May be worth using for home cinema, as it has VP9 and AV1 decoders as far as I know, but again... hopefully the drivers make those usable and not buggy.

 

 

[bal723]

13 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Apparently the way they made the ARC cards, they're quite sensitive to lack of PCI-e Resizable BAR so they won't work very well with such old cpu / motherboard. 

Also, as far as I saw from GamersNexus review, the drivers have problems and you get quite high frame times periodically (feels like fps drops to 10-20fps every few seconds, something like that). See the video, at around 5:30 you see some games get up to 40% more fps just with Resizable BAR enable

 

Overall I'd say it's not worth it at that price, maybe look for a new RX 6400 / RX 6500 or a used RX 470 / RX 480 / RX 570 / RX 580 or a 1060 from nVidia even if it costs 20-50$ more.

 

RX 4xx / RX 5xx would be better because they have full pci-e x16, while this ARC310 is only pci-e x8 if my memory is correct and RX 6400 / 6500 are pci-e 4.0 x4 so they'll have a bit of performance loss on motherboards that don't do pci-e 4.0

 

While it has RT cores and DLSS , it's the lowest end ARC card  ... it's in the name, 310 ... so it's super slow. Whatever small amount of RT cores are there, aren't enough to render something 

 

He's testing A380 which is much more capable than Arc A310 and it's still slow, the A380 sits somewhere between a GTX 1050Ti and a RX6400 which is a bit slower than a RX 580 in most games (but the RX6400 being newer uses much less power and is available in low-profile models) , so probably even a RX 470/ RX 570 will be better than A380, not to mention A310. 

 

May be worth using for home cinema, as it has VP9 and AV1 decoders as far as I know, but again... hopefully the drivers make those usable and not buggy.

 

 

do you remember 5500 xt that had 8 lines pcie 4.0 and lost only 1% of performance on pcie 3.0?

there might be a not a huge slowdown for a310 too btw plus I'm gotta use it for gaming and maybe recording

[mariushm]

6 minutes ago, bal723 said:

do you remember 5500 xt that had 8 lines pcie 4.0 and lost only 1% of performance on pcie 3.0?

there might be a not a huge slowdown for a310 too btw plus I'm gotta use it for gaming and maybe recording

IF/WHEN the hardware encoders will  be supported in OBS or whatever you use, then maybe you'll use it for recording.

 

But like I said, I want to point out the BIG difference between 1% Low and Max FPS versus other cards :

 

From 11:14 in A380 review, Tomb Raider on high quality -  you can see that without resizable BAR, it gets 38.5 fps average, with 1% lows (which you'll definitely feel) at 21.5fps  - the game will basically feel like running at 30fps ... and 0.1% lows at 18.5 fps  - with resizable bar, the minimums jump to 41-42fps ... so it's double the framerate. 

 

In contrast even the RX 6400 minimums are 44 fps and maximum are 56.8 fps and the game will feel much smoother, more consistent, not a fps yo-yo - this is again at high quality - drop to medium and maybe lower some shadow quality and you have smooth 60 fps gameplay from a RX6400

 

And again, this is A380 , there's A350 which is worse and then there's A310 you plan to get - it wouldn't suprise me to see 15-20 fps for A310.

 

 

 

 

 

Here's a 6500XT review ,  6500XT has 1024 stream processors and 110w power consumption,  6400 has only 768  and around 60w power consumption, so extrapolate from that the performance. 

The RX 6400 and 6500 cards don't have hardware encoders, true, but you could use x264 (software) to encode  what you play. Or get a used RX 4xx / 5xx and use the hardware encoder on those and get better fps from those old cards (just don't get a mining version of the cards, the versions with only 1 video output)

 

 

[bal723]

30 minutes ago, mariushm said:

IF/WHEN the hardware encoders will  be supported in OBS or whatever you use, then maybe you'll use it for recording.

 

But like I said, I want to point out the BIG difference between 1% Low and Max FPS versus other cards :

 

From 11:14 in A380 review, Tomb Raider on high quality -  you can see that without resizable BAR, it gets 38.5 fps average, with 1% lows (which you'll definitely feel) at 21.5fps  - the game will basically feel like running at 30fps ... and 0.1% lows at 18.5 fps  - with resizable bar, the minimums jump to 41-42fps ... so it's double the framerate. 

 

In contrast even the RX 6400 minimums are 44 fps and maximum are 56.8 fps and the game will feel much smoother, more consistent, not a fps yo-yo - this is again at high quality - drop to medium and maybe lower some shadow quality and you have smooth 60 fps gameplay from a RX6400

 

And again, this is A380 , there's A350 which is worse and then there's A310 you plan to get - it wouldn't suprise me to see 15-20 fps for A310.

 

 

 

 

 

Here's a 6500XT review ,  6500XT has 1024 stream processors and 110w power consumption,  6400 has only 768  and around 60w power consumption, so extrapolate from that the performance. 

The RX 6400 and 6500 cards don't have hardware encoders, true, but you could use x264 (software) to encode  what you play. Or get a used RX 4xx / 5xx and use the hardware encoder on those and get better fps from those old cards (just don't get a mining version of the cards, the versions with only 1 video output)

 

 

A350 isnt confirmed, and also, I don't play sotr I only play fh4, fh5, f1 22 and other racing sim games

[jaslion]

1 hour ago, bal723 said:

I have an Chinese lga 2011 motherboard with a good old 6 core xeon 2630L v2 cpu,

and this week I saw msrp of arc a310 - 99$

but I am worried about compatibility of my system, on intel's site it says that it might cause problems,

should i take the risk?

Whilst it will work the lack of resisable bar makes it basically unusable. The average performance will be ok but there will be stutters and hitches every couple of seconds. So basically any game will be an awfull experience.

 

Id opt for basically anything else here.

[bal723]

18 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Whilst it will work the lack of resisable bar makes it basically unusable. The average performance will be ok but there will be stutters and hitches every couple of seconds. So basically any game will be an awfull experience.

 

Id opt for basically anything else here.

rebar makes it a little faster, like 5% or maybe 10% but its still a same level as gtx 1630, 770, 1050, 950

[jaslion]

3 minutes ago, bal723 said:

rebar makes it a little faster, like 5% or maybe 10% but its still a same level as gtx 1630, 770, 1050, 950

I dont think you fully understood what I said.

 

Rebar does make it faster on average 20%.

 

BUT what rebar does is give you a STABLE framerate. Without rebar you will literally go from 60 to 0 fps up to multiple times a second. This results in an unplayable game experience.

 

Imagine if someone kept pausing a video you are watching non stop. Thats the experience you will be getting.

[bal723]

5 minutes ago, jaslion said:

I dont think you fully understood what I said.

 

Rebar does make it faster on average 20%.

 

BUT what rebar does is give you a STABLE framerate. Without rebar you will literally go from 60 to 0 fps up to multiple times a second. This results in an unplayable game experience.

 

Imagine if someone kept pausing a video you are watching non stop. Thats the experience you will be getting.

look at this benchmarks of gunnir a380

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vrwfHuEb_Gw&list=LL&index=5

(Dont mind other videos, its my liked videos list)

[jaslion]

22 minutes ago, bal723 said:

look at this benchmarks of gunnir a380

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vrwfHuEb_Gw&list=LL&index=5

(Dont mind other videos, its my liked videos list)

Ye itdoes the hitching there too. Its even visible in the video on a platform with rebar now imagine it 10x worse on one without.

 

You are far better off with a older used card here

[bal723]

3 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Ye itdoes the hitching there too. Its even visible in the video on a platform with rebar now imagine it 10x worse on one without.

 

You are far better off with a older used card here

ima wait until arc anyways, because my 770 RN has the same good gaming performance

[mariushm]

It's A380 , you plan on getting A310  which is much slower. 

 

And again , HALF the performance if Rebar is OFF : 

 

The GREEN is  AVERAGE fps -  IF you have 2 frames that are done each in 10 ms (less than 16.66 ms, what's needed for 60 fps) and one frame that takes 50 ms to be done (20 fps) then the average fps would be 3 frames per 70 ms  or 0.42 frames per 10ms or 0.42 x 100 = 42 fps. If you get such a repeated pattern even though the average fps will be 42 fps, the game will play like shit, hiccup-ing all the time. 

The 1% values are more representative than average fps.

 

 

 

You have in GamersNexus review video a graph with frame times  - you can see approximately every 200 ms, the frame time spikes to 200+ ms meaning for 1 5th of a second you're looking at a frozen screen, every 5 seconds or so. 

 

[bal723]

36 minutes ago, mariushm said:

It's A380 , you plan on getting A310  which is much slower. 

 

And again , HALF the performance if Rebar is OFF : 

 

The GREEN is  AVERAGE fps -  IF you have 2 frames that are done each in 10 ms (less than 16.66 ms, what's needed for 60 fps) and one frame that takes 50 ms to be done (20 fps) then the average fps would be 3 frames per 70 ms  or 0.42 frames per 10ms or 0.42 x 100 = 42 fps. If you get such a repeated pattern even though the average fps will be 42 fps, the game will play like shit, hiccup-ing all the time. 

The 1% values are more representative than average fps.

 

 

 

You have in GamersNexus review video a graph with frame times  - you can see approximately every 200 ms, the frame time spikes to 200+ ms meaning for 1 5th of a second you're looking at a frozen screen, every 5 seconds or so. 

 

But its still usable gpu for gaming

[jaslion]

6 minutes ago, bal723 said:

But its still usable gpu for gaming

Its not. Every minute your screen would be frozen for 12 seconds.

 

If you call that usable for gaming then sure whatever but I would not call that usable at all. Not even for just using windows.

 

 

[bal723]

Just now, jaslion said:

Its not. Every minute your screen would be frozen for 12 seconds.

 

If you call that usable for gaming then sure whatever but I would not call that usable at all. Not even for just using windows.

 

 

Gamer nexus has problems with software so the stutters will be fixed fast

[jaslion]

3 minutes ago, bal723 said:

Gamer nexus has problems with software so the stutters will be fixed fast

Everyone has the problems. You cannot know that it will be fixed. For all we know this is how the first gen will be.

 

As of right now this gpu is very very very bad for you to use. I do not expect it to change as intel themselves said that rebar is pretty much a requirement for smooth operation.

 

You dont have it so dont get this gpu. It will be a big pile of crap.

[bal723]

18 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Everyone has the problems. You cannot know that it will be fixed. For all we know this is how the first gen will be.

 

As of right now this gpu is very very very bad for you to use. I do not expect it to change as intel themselves said that rebar is pretty much a requirement for smooth operation.

 

You dont have it so dont get this gpu. It will be a big pile of crap.

ima get it anyways because its a cheap gpu if you look at PC build prices ( my PC is around 450-500$ with current gpu )

[Blue4130]

15 hours ago, bal723 said:

ima get it anyways because its a cheap gpu if you look at PC build prices ( my PC is around 450-500$ with current gpu )

It's cheap because it's a shit card for what you want to do with it.