What kind of performance gains with iGPU passthrough/hw transcoding?


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For those of you passing your iGPU through to Plex for HW transcoding, what kind of performance gains are you seeing and/or how much of a load are you seeing being taken off your CPUs?  I'd love if you could also share which processor and how many/what types of transcodes you're doing.

 

Trying to spec out a new CPU for my server and wondering how valuable getting a CPU with iGPU is since you can't get any server grade CPUs with more than 6-cores/12-threads.

Edited by IamSpartacus
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I've done lots of research on this subject.

 

Depending on the video being transcoded it can take all the load off the CPU. I have my PMS in a VM with 32GB of RAM with most of that allocated to a RAM drive for transcoding.

My GPU I'm using is a old GTX 760. One day I will get a Quadro P2000 but for now since most of my stuff is H.264 it's working fine. I have noticed that depending on the video some h.265/HEVC videos will go through the GPU too.

 

That VM also has 6 threads (3 cores) assigned to it.

 

If you do live TV just note that currently it won't transcode anything recorded in the GPU. You can turn the option on in the settings to have it transcode recordings but it only does it after recording and even then it's done on the CPU.

If watching live TV then it will use the GPU for the client.

If you got one of those tuners from Hdhomerun that does transcoding in the tuner then you don't need to worry about any of this because that box will send out a h.264 stream to your PMS.

 

Make sure you're using Windows for you PMS VM as it's the only OS that allows decoding and encoding at the same time on a Nvidia GPU.

 

Finally consider cost of resources. Compair the cost of running a GPU 24/7 vs. buying an Nvidia Shield TV and running the built in PMS in it (which does GPU encoding for everything up to h.265). It may be easier for your situation to do that vs. worrying about your server, having an extra slot taken up by something, etc.

 

So in closing let's me give you the breakdown of my PMS Server/VM.

 

OS: Windows 10 Pro build 1809

Used group policy to disable the auto reboots for updates, disabled sleep settings. Installed ImDisk Tools for the RAM drive, I have mine at 28 GB (saves on wear and tear of SSDs/Cache arrays.). Windows doesn't have to be activated, mine isn't.

 

RAM: 32 GB

Maybe overkill but my server has 96GB of RAM and I never used half of it so why not?

 

CPU: 3 Cores

I just gave mine 3 cores which is 6 threads.

 

Video Card: GTX 760

It transcodes most of my library so for now it's good but in the future when prices come down I'll get a Quadro P2000

 

Just map a network drive to your media share and setup Plex as normal after that.

 

Any questions after that just ask. I gave you all the information I had because a lot of this isn't documented or documented very well, hope this helps!

 

Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk

 

 

 

 

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