Sparkle Arc A380 Genie

[Denver]

These cards are fine for 4K. Just lower your expectations - run StarCraft 2, CS GO or CS 2 at 4K, it will be just fine.

I tried 4K gaming with an ancient Radeon RX 560, and this thing here is much faster.

View attachment 336003

I'd say go even lower because there's a good chance you won't even be able to play old titles on Arc.

 

[Pepamami]

recently bought A310 so I can use ryzen 5900X, I wonder how bad this card is, according to A380 performance

 

[Onasi]

I'd say go even lower because there's a good chance you won't even be able to play old titles on Arc.

They have improved a lot compared to release, so you’ll be able to play. The performance will be probably suboptimal, but still. It’s not as much of a mess as it used to be. At least the stuff mentioned, like CS or LoL or Dota or whatever will run no problem.

 

[Lew Zealand]

How conveniently to use only the graphs that fit your claim?

This card has 6 GB of VRAM, which is still better than the 4 GB found in both RX 6400 and 6500 XT.
Also, when showing that 1K result, you should clarify that's the current AMD driver helping.
But if you take a look at the more serious graphics loads where the card is pushed to its limits, you will see that you are wrong:

4K:
View attachment 335989

This is without even mentioning that the poor RX 6400 and RX 6500 XT lack features such as AV1, H.262 MPEG-2, JPEG, video codec accelerators.

Using 4K Ultra numbers to argue something about below-entry level GPUs is the very definition of foolish cherry-picking and citing useless numbers. What a LOL.

I used 1080p because that's the only possible use case for gaming with these GPUs. And these are at Ultra settings with current games, older games at Medium is better match and playing at 900p or 720p is yet more viable.

4GB vs 6GB is irrelevant when the 4GB GPU gets higher framerates. H.262, MP2, JPEG? What is this 1998? Those are handled by a CPU with minimal power use. AV1 is the Arc 380's calling card, that is a real feature that's useful for a cheap transcoding setup.

 

[W1zzard]

recently bought A310 so I can use ryzen 5900X, I wonder how bad this card is, according to A380 performance

I have a Sparkle A310 here, too, will work on the review soon

 

[Lew Zealand]

These cards are fine for 4K. Just lower your expectations - run StarCraft 2, CS GO or CS 2 at 4K, it will be just fine.

I tried 4K gaming with an ancient Radeon RX 560, and this thing here is much faster.

View attachment 336003

LOL this just gets better. Again from this very review, CS2 at 4K is 15 FPS. Are you doing OK or just having a fun troll?

 

[AusWolf]

I could see it being sorta useful to breathe a new life into an old-ish (but not too old) PC with a CPU that lacks IGP.

Nope - as far as I know, it needs ReBar enabled, which older motherboards don't have. So no, it isn't really good for anything.

 

[Onasi]

Nope - as far as I know, it needs ReBar enabled, which older motherboards don't have. So no, it isn't really good for anything.

It will work without ReBAR, just not very well. In the hyper specific example that I am talking about it would do in a pinch. Though, to be fair, in said example a 1030 would do just as well for less money.

 

[Pepamami]

Nope - as far as I know, it needs ReBar enabled, which older motherboards don't have. So no, it isn't really good for anything.

zens 1-3 have ReBar and missing IGP. I took one for zen3, coz I wanted a basic 2 displays support, AV1 decoder and the Cheapest one on market.

It will work without ReBAR, just not very well. In the hyper specific example that I am talking about it would do in a pinch. Though, to be fair, in said example a 1030 would do just as well for less money.

some how 1030 cost the same price in my stores as A380, and A310 with more/same performance and more features costs less than 1030 (like 2 times Less!)
Ps. don't get we wrong, I dont have super cheap A380/A310, I have overpriced 1030.

 

[AusWolf]

It will work without ReBAR, just not very well. In the hyper specific example that I am talking about it would do in a pinch. Though, to be fair, in said example a 1030 would do just as well for less money.

Or a used 1650 LP.

 

[wickerman]

outside of gaming the low end ARC cards are great little encoders. Can run passively without their fan and suddenly youve got a single slot, slot powered, passively cooled card to handle damn near any encoding job including new AV1. I did just this with an Arc A310 turning a bunch of old 1080p bluray rips down to 720p h265 to save space. The fact that it also gave me 4 display outputs was icing on the cake. And you get modern display outputs not just an HDMI 1.4 + VGA/DVI that youd see on older cards that might be alternatives for adding more screens.

I'd say cards like this absolutely have their use, and its a shame Intel's marketing didnt push harder that these are basically a way to add intels quicksync encoding to pcs without an intel integrated gpu.

But I'd agree the low end Arc cards are just not a good choice for gaming if thats a priority. There are games it runs well enough, but its kind of a narrow range as anything too new or too old runs into driver issues or gets held back by the cut down die.

 

[Pepamami]

Or a used 1650 LP.

can find a New 1650 priced the same as A380, and with way better performance, but only if u want to play some 3D games, if u use ur PC only for Work, I would suggest to stick with A310/A380 anyway.

 

[sLowEnd]

Ooof that fan behaviour is a deal breaker

 

[zgradt]

I put an A380 in my daughter's computer. It seems fine. She only plays roblox and minecraft, but I tried Overwatch and got over 100fps. Seems pretty okay. It's one of the cards with an additional power plug though, so it has a nice overclock from the factory.

 

[micropage7]

actually i expect something like if you can't run it for heavy graphic processor you can use it as co processor or something for rendering or AI co processor

 

[theouto]

Slot powered AV1 encode/decode. Welp, it has successfully made the 3050 6GB irrelevant! Or at least for jellyfin use.

 

[watzupken]

I guess looking at the performance of the higher tier Intel GPUs, the sense is that this will not be a gaming grade card. In my mind, while it performs worst than a RX 6500 XT in most cases, at least it is more useful than the RX 6500 XT due to the updated AV1 encoders/ decoders. So it will be a great drop in card for PCs with CPUs that don't offer any iGPU or great for a home theater PC. But I do feel that the price needs to be lower. The likes of RX 6500 XT is not good for anything, and the RTX 3050 6GB is too overpriced when it is not even good for games.

 

[OffShoreFisherman]

A little late to this discussion, but there's more to the story than the results presented in this review, especially in regards to overclocking. As of this posting, I have been running my Sparkle A380 ELF, the Genie's older sibling, that the Genie shares DNA with, for over TWO months.

The following need to be taken into consideration when running the ELF/GENIE straight out of the box with the Intel Control software:

1. default GPU frequency is 2000 MHz with some incremental boosting
2. Max. Power Limit is 43W.

The above fundamentally handicaps the A380 by Sparkle and, hence, the mediocre results in the review. Why Sparkle did this is a mystery since A380's "elsewhere" have higher values for both (e.g., 2450 MHz and 92W (w/PCIe 8-pin), respectively). Knowing that these higher settings are possible, I pushed my ELF harder with the use of third party software:

1. Predator BiFrost Control app
2. Arc OC Tool

The above can be Googled as to their specific usage.

Using said tools, I set the following:

1. OC Lock Freq = 2400
2. OC Lock Volt = 0.785
3. OC Power Limit = 75W (the PCIe slot max)

Did this turn the ELF into a 1080p High card with recent AAA titles? No, but 1080p Medium with selective High textures is a more realistic goal. I got mid-70's FPS with Borderlands 3/Tiny Tina's Wonderlands in-game benchmarks. Then I smoothed out the experience by capping to 62 FPS to ensure the magical 60 FPS standard. There is at least a known YouTube video showing a GENIE being pushed in the same way.

After all is said and done, the ELF becomes equivalent to the RX 470/480/570/580 (and I know first hand with my overclocked XFX 470 8GB). Why not just run with one of those AMD's? Well, for the following:

1. AMD stopped driver enhancements for newer titles as of 2023
2. the 75W max or less power requirement is way lower than any of the mentioned RX cards

Since I got my opened box A380 ELF for < $90 USD, and my 9th Gen MB received a beta BIOS that supports REBAR, it has so far been worth it. With the impending release of Battlemage, am hoping that remaining new GENIE's will be discounted accordingly for a better value buy...and will get one as well.

As always, YMMV.