Best Cost/Energy Efficient GPU for Passthrough Video Tanscoding?

[SimplifyAndAddCoffee]

Hi, I am looking to build a new server box with a dedicated GPU for hardware accelerated video transcoding on Jellyfin. What GPUs should I be looking at for best performance, compatibility, and lowest energy requirements (at idle)?

[Kilrah]

None, use an Intel CPU with built in graphics instead.

[SimplifyAndAddCoffee]

1 hour ago, Kilrah said:

None, use an Intel CPU with built in graphics instead.

Xeon E5 does not have that, and that's what I have for this build.

[Lolight]

On 11/24/2022 at 2:55 AM, SimplifyAndAddCoffee said:

Xeon E5 does not have that, and that's what I have for this build.

Do you need to transcode?

Asking since so many simply assume that everyone does without understanding why.

Edited November 25, 2022 by Lolight

[aburgesser]

Sweating DGPU efficiency for an E5 system is putting the cart before the horse, no?

 

If you want the best best possible DGPU HW transcoding, pick the cheapest SKU of the latest gen of your preferred flavor. HW transcoding improves in quality every generation, but does not improve with a bigger chip. The smallest possible chip with the support will probably be most power efficient. If you want to prioritize power efficiency over quality, do some research or switch to an IGPU.

 

If you already transcode your library for space savings, you may not need HW transcoding. I find I really need to crush the stream bitrate before I trigger transcoding on my server. Alternatively, an E5 should have enough power to real-time encode a pair of streams on its own.

[SimplifyAndAddCoffee]

11 hours ago, aburgesser said:

I'm preparing to transcode appx 10TB of media to standardize my library, and then all incoming/outgoing media henceforth so yeah... I really didn't think that CPU was beefy enough for it though. It struggles just to run blueiris.