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.