Just wanted to chime in case anyone else wants to Google and find out about Intel Arc's Cards and their Encoding abilities since there is so much second-hand misinformation and clearly a lack of Arc Cards being used for Streaming, defeating it's whole point.
I also wish people would stop asking about the same old "Logs and stuff" for 2 seconds and instead actually say what the problem is - Intel and their Arc Cards alongside a persons CPU/Motherboard, it's getting old at this point.
TLDR: Basically put, most of the Intel Baseline Arc Cards are actually not great Encoders for or any other real-time stuff on a budget, which ironically kind defeats their purpose. You're better off investing in your main PC or buying an actual pre-made Transcoding PC with a proper CPU. No amount of Drivers will fix any of these issues.
TL: All the claims that even the A310 can do 16 Full HD Encodes on the fly for "cheap" are complete utter rubbish, because no one mentions how fast they are actually at Encoding or what their setup are (or what type of Transcoding they are doing).
They might be fantastic for PLEX Encoders (where people are amazed at 90FPS HEVC Encoding on an Offline Video at 4K where it actually runs at 24, Interlaced upto 30), but if you're trying to Stream multiple videos at the same time (Enhanced Broadcasting for Twitch and 1440p on Youtube to fight off it's terrible compression), you're going to drop down in the 40-20 FPS region very easily depending on your Setup and Scenes.
And that's what OBS is reporting mind you, the actual performance is more like 10-15 FPS, with massive latency on the output (as in the videos can get delayed with stutters for 30 seconds or more).
If you have a decent 10th Gen CPU/Motherboard (ei; supports Resizable Bar) then you're in luck, you can recover a whopping 50% of your Real-time Encoding performance back (so from 40 you might get an unstable 60).
Also surprise, your Motherboard needs to also have the full PCie4 Lane speed open to recover all that (good luck with that on very cheap focused Boards that like to skip on the Lane-Speed), otherwise you only recover back 10% of your Encoding Performance.
So if you happen to have a Gen3/Shoddy Gen4 Motherboard that has "Above 4G Decoding" (but for those back in the Crypto craze), you're still not getting anything.
Basically put, an actual budget barebones Second Streaming PC cannot use Intel Arc Cards for Encoding, like at all...
Worst Part? Good Luck having anything else open, FORGET about using something like NDI (which again defeats the whole point). This is OBS running purely by itself on a Cheap Second Streaming PC Setup. Anything more and you might as well just invest that extra 500-800$ (on a bare system mind you) in today's markets back into your main PC for Streaming.
And this is with an Arc 310, some people claim you need to go up to an Arc 750 with a more robust CPU that has the iGPU because apparently that's what unlocks the full potential of an Intel Arc Card Encoding (might as well lock in that 1,000$ system while at it just for Streaming - I guess that's budget for some people).
The fact that you need at least a 500$ system (before taxes) to take advantage of just the budget card is a complete joke. You might as well put that money towards a 5080/5090 and get your Encoding there (this is not a Joke BTW, you can literally invest your second Streaming PC to your main one for that price).
Oh, did I also mention then Arc Encoders are alreadly outdated? Something about "Screen Content Compression" Protocols that apparently have almost a 40% better Video Compression are not avaible on these Cards now, but are on even Gen-10 Intel iGPU's? Seriously, what is the value of these Cards at this point? And they're being sold so much money as well....
The irony here is outright buying a more expensive Card does better, or buying an older card that doesn't require Bar/PCie4 encodes provides about the same quality (outside of the latest HEVC/AV1 improvements of course at Hardware level).
Hell, just buying a cheaper but more modern Processor and using that as your second PC Encoder is much better (I used an older 1060 and cranked out every FFMpeg option I could, is started fuming and the quality was less for multiple streams, but it only needed 1/4th of the budget to "fully use" vs an "Intel Arc"), even a 7700K Encodes much better for it's own budget.
That's my rant of the day. Sorry to say this, but the budget Intel Arc Cards are utter rubbish based upon "word of mouth" from people who clearly don't use them, and whatever "ads" we saw with wild claims are made in "best case scenario".
All those videos of people "streaming" with an Arc 310 were literally doing 1 Stream (as in using the Multistream Plugin and simply spitting out the same video in 2 different locations) they weren't transcoding multiple videos at all.
Anyways, cheers.
obsproject.com
