Hi, I have a general question about hardware transcode, specifically Intel hardware transcode. For more than 5 years I have followed this guide to enable QS hardware transcode: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/77943-guide-plex-hardware-acceleration-using-intel-quick-sync/ and it has worked perfectly. It works with either my i7 10700 iGPU and my A350.

Yesterday I was reading this article: https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-mtl-i915-xe-linux and it mentioned that i915 is and old driver (not a bad one), but mentioned that Intel has a newer one called "Xe" (probably refers to their iGPU's that use similar cores as the alchemist/battlemage archs).

It looks like that in all tests the "new XE" driver is better; I then started wondering that I'm almost sure I'm using the i915, and if there is a way to switch to the "new XE" driver? Tbh I don;t know that much about this topic, I just don;t know if the current unraid linux kernel has the "Xe driver" built -in, if is it possible to use it and if there is going to be any benefit on using it.

So, if someone know about this, I would like to get your insights on it.

23 hours ago, Rommel said:

Hi, I have a general question about hardware transcode, specifically Intel hardware transcode. For more than 5 years I have followed this guide to enable QS hardware transcode: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/77943-guide-plex-hardware-acceleration-using-intel-quick-sync/ and it has worked perfectly. It works with either my i7 10700 iGPU and my A350.

Yesterday I was reading this article: https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-mtl-i915-xe-linux and it mentioned that i915 is and old driver (not a bad one), but mentioned that Intel has a newer one called "Xe" (probably refers to their iGPU's that use similar cores as the alchemist/battlemage archs).

It looks like that in all tests the "new XE" driver is better; I then started wondering that I'm almost sure I'm using the i915, and if there is a way to switch to the "new XE" driver? Tbh I don;t know that much about this topic, I just don;t know if the current unraid linux kernel has the "Xe driver" built -in, if is it possible to use it and if there is going to be any benefit on using it.

So, if someone know about this, I would like to get your insights on it.

You need to stop the i915 driver binding to the device and get xe to load for it.

From lspcu you can find the info required for the force_probe.

lspci -nn | grep VGA

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Arrow Lake-S [Intel Graphics] [8086:7d67] (rev 06)

04:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation DG2 [Arc A770] [8086:56a0] (rev 08)

0e:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation TU106 [GeForce RTX 2060 Rev. A] [10de:1f08] (rev a1)

80:14.5 Non-VGA unclassified device [0000]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7f2f] (rev 10)

in my case 56a0 for the A770

For the i915 driver you need to do

options i915 force_probe=!56a0 note ! in front of the model.

and for XE

options xe force_probe=56a0

You can add them to modprobe files via system drivers in tools as below, but change to match your device.

Thanks @SimonF , will take a look into this later this week; I'm not that good doing this kind of changes/adjustments by myself, usually I follow step by step guides, but will try and report back.

Hello, good!

I've been following the steps and I can't get it to work.

Unraid 6.12.42-Unraid

7.2.0-beta.2

Intel arc pro b50

Edited September 19, 2025Sep 19 by fushigi

Hi @SimonF , I forgot to do this but I just tried and everything is working fine. I would say that my transcoding got a performance boost with this new driver on Handbrake; I use to transcode at ~270 fps and now it is doing it at ~340 fps.

The only issue is that now I can not see GPU stat when using GPU Statistics plugin; could it be because the plugin does not work with Xe driver?

2 hours ago, Rommel said:

Hi @SimonF , I forgot to do this but I just tried and everything is working fine. I would say that my transcoding got a performance boost with this new driver on Handbrake; I use to transcode at ~270 fps and now it is doing it at ~340 fps.

The only issue is that now I can not see GPU stat when using GPU Statistics plugin; could it be because the plugin does not work with Xe driver?

There is no tools to provide but I am looking at options.

It works for me with setting those things in system drivers, but then plex fails to transcode, anything I need to change for that?

I am also running into issues here trying to get my Arc B50 gpu to work with my plex container? I can confirm its running the xe driver using the following command, but the second plex tries to transcode it the stream crashes.

@Gouden Sounds like you are having the same problem as my setup when i switch from my ARC A380 (works and transcodes like a champ) to Arc B50 (Battlemage, and does not work with my plex container for unknown reason.)

@SimonF Anything else I would need to look at?

lspci -k -s 03:00.0

Unraid 7.3.2

Linuxserver plex container

Edited July 27Jul 27 by TheDon

On 7/11/2026 at 12:03 PM, Gouden said:

It works for me with setting those things in system drivers, but then plex fails to transcode, anything I need to change for that?

I don’t fully recall what I did for Plex to work; if I recall correctly I just repeat the steps required to enable hardware transcoding, assign the GPU within Plex container and that was all. Did you tried doing that?

56 minutes ago, TheDon said:

I am also running into issues here trying to get my Arc B50 gpu to work with my plex container? I can confirm its running the xe driver using the following command, but the second plex tries to transcode it the stream crashes.

@Gouden Sounds like you are having the same problem as my setup when i switch from my ARC A380 (works and transcodes like a champ) to Arc B50 (Battlemage, and does not work with my plex container for unknown reason.)

@SimonF Anything else I would need to look at?

lspci -k -s 03:00.0

Unraid 7.3.2

Linuxserver plex container

I already reply to @Gouden, maybe it helps. However, I’m unsure on how those steps will work with a B50

@Rommel I continued my deep dive after posting that, and it turns out my new ARC gpu might require ReBar, and my ancient motherboard my unraid server is using may just not be good enough anymore

2 hours ago, TheDon said:

@Rommel I continued my deep dive after posting that, and it turns out my new ARC gpu might require ReBar, and my ancient motherboard my unraid server is using may just not be good enough anymore

Yes that is the same conclusion I came to with some other people.

Arc requires rebar enabled

FWIW, I modded my bios to add ReBar and the mb is ~14 years old (Ivy Bridge CPU, Z77 chipset era). ;)

But I'm on A380 and i915 (mostly transcoding and immich machine learning).

https://github.com/xCuri0/ReBARUEFI

Found it already done for my mb there but made som more mods before flashing it.

Edited July 28Jul 28 by Niklas

On 7/27/2026 at 10:48 PM, TheDon said:

I am also running into issues here trying to get my Arc B50 gpu to work with my plex container? I can confirm its running the xe driver using the following command, but the second plex tries to transcode it the stream crashes.

@Gouden Sounds like you are having the same problem as my setup when i switch from my ARC A380 (works and transcodes like a champ) to Arc B50 (Battlemage, and does not work with my plex container for unknown reason.)

@SimonF Anything else I would need to look at?

lspci -k -s 03:00.0

Unraid 7.3.2

Linuxserver plex container

You should not need to exclude the B50 for i915 and force on xe because the B50 is only in xe. But should not cause any issue. Everything looks valid from a system side. Like you said may need rebar support.

@SimonF i think i asked you a few months ago about xe driver. At this time if i remember correctly it was not available because of unraid kernel (before V7).

I didn't have time to look at it since. But i have a new server (running in proxmox) with intel gear which has integrated gpu+npu.cpu. I tried to use it for local inference without great success.

Anyway i found a repo about a tool to monitor intel gpu with xe driver (also i915) details of compatible hardware are on the repo. I compiled it ti run it in a docker container and it seems to be working great. Maybe you can do something with it. the repo is Topswatch

3 hours ago, caplam said:

@SimonF i think i asked you a few months ago about xe driver. At this time if i remember correctly it was not available because of unraid kernel (before V7).

I didn't have time to look at it since. But i have a new server (running in proxmox) with intel gear which has integrated gpu+npu.cpu. I tried to use it for local inference without great success.

Anyway i found a repo about a tool to monitor intel gpu with xe driver (also i915) details of compatible hardware are on the repo. I compiled it ti run it in a docker container and it seems to be working great. Maybe you can do something with it. the repo is Topswatch

Thanks for the info, I started using https://github.com/ulissesf/qmassa in gpustat to get xe stats