Is buying an Intel A380 worth it?

I was having some dropped frame issues on my PC, and my phones video is pretty much unusable so I figured its probably a lack of hardware acceleration. Is it worth it to buy an Intel A380 which I've found for $120, or is it not worth it? For reference I currently have an i5 8600k and 16gb of RAM running Ubuntu Server headlessly.

8 comments

I have an A380 running in my home server which runs Arch Linux with kernel version 6.4.6. I've had the card since since October 2022, so I've seen my share of "issues" with it, especially because my Jellyfin server runs inside of Docker and thus adds additional layer of complexity / things that can go wrong.

Having said that, for $120, BUY IT. It's seriously one of the better cards are out there at that price. Previously I had an RX 550 (for which I paid about €75) and the A380 runs circles around my old RX550.

When I initially got it, I had some issues with is. Not surprising, early adopter and all. But the drivers are pretty rock stable nowadays and new features are being added constantly. The latest release of the Intel Media Driver added support for encoding HEVC 422 and improved performance for HDR tone mapping.

With regards to maximum streams, I am currently able to get a transcoding limit of 4 streams from H265 10bit (1080p) to H264 and still have some horsepower left over.

It's even so stable and pleasant to use, I am genuinely considering getting an A750 for my desktop.

Edit: typing hard yo.

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- Ok sweet, I think I'm going to get it because the igpu just isn't cutting it. My current setup just doesn't seem capable of doing 4k playback so it'd be great to get that.
  
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  I've tested it with the jellyfish test files, IIRC it can easily transcode the 120Mbits per second 4k video to 1080p!
  
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Hey, I bought one actually because I have a media server + I will soon have 4, h265 camera streams that I want simultaneously if needed. Right now, I have no GPU and my CPU will struggle with some h265 encoded media if it is higher quality.

The problem right now is that Debian and thus, Ubuntu Server don't ship with a latest 6.2+ kernel. Only 6.1. Since I use ZFS for all of my storage that has to be compiled with the kernel, I don't want to hack my way around a custom kernel version + a custom ZFS build for something I want reliability on.

Currently kernel 6.4 is Trixie(testing) repo before it gets put in backports for debian. Jellyfin recommends 6.2+ and I don't even know if it will work for trancoding before that.

I don't know how kernel releases work in Ubuntu server, but that is importent to know before you buy. (Edit: actuually, maybe I will switch to Testing to get that kernel update and already use the GPU to test)

That stuff out of the way, the A380 is literally on par with the RTX 3090 for h265 encoding at release and is the cheapest AV1 transcoder right now. It competes with the best encoders for $150. That is really a good value even if it isn't a good gaming GPU.

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I've wondered this too. I have a similar enough server and think it might be worth it, but it depends on what is causing your issues. Your 8600k should have a UHD630 in it and this forum post describes great 4k HDR transcoding performance.

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Is Jellyfin all you run on your server? If yes, it's unlikely a hardware horsepower problem and you should look closer at your local network and devices used for viewing. Well thinking longer about it, it is also depending on the media watched (codecs especially - how often do you need to transcode) and number of concurrent streams.. Afaik the A380 is great for transcoding and the AV1 support offers a great future proof GPU. LTT made a video about using this GPU for a Plex server - the results shouldn't be too different for Jellyfin I think

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- I run a few different self hosted applications on this PC, Nextcloud, Gitea, and Navidrome. It seems I need to transcode pretty often it seems, I'm pretty technical in most aspects but I'm a noob in this area so I might be wrong, but the player info says stuff like 74.5% transcoded and stuff like that on all the media I've played. For 120$ and just for the love of tinkering it might be worth it anyways.
  
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  The percentage shows how much of the currently watched media is already transcoded - if your hardware were too weak and the transcoding is slower than the playback, you could wait for it to transcode like 30% before you start watching. I feel that :D if my 1070 wouldn't be more than enough at the moment, I'd bite the bullet, too
  
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