Considering adding a quadro card to my system

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

I have a server that I use for various background tasks I don’t want to bog my main rig with, one of which being plex transcoding. All my media is in H.265, so it uses a lot of horsepower to transcode down for streaming to anything except directly to my main pc. The system consists of dual Xeon 2670’s and 12 dedicated gigs of ram. Through my hypervisor I have set for the windows 10 vm running plex, up to 28 of the 32 cores are shared with the vm. However, there are some issues. If I completely stop and video transcoding that is running on a different vm, to convert all my remux blu rays to H.265, I am BARELY able to get 2 4k 10bit to 1080p 20mbps transcodes. I read plex wants a passmark of 17,000 for a single 4k transcode and I get 17,834 without anything else and about 13700 if I’m transcoding in the back, giving priority to plex.

I really don’t like buffering, especially since the whole purpose of my server was to spend dozens of hours troubleshooting, then have it work perfectly in the end. So having it buffer so easily isn’t fine for me. I looked around and saw the Quadro p2000 is a popular choice to boost the amount of streams many people can run considerably.I was wondering once and for all how much truth would there be to this, along with whether or not there is any quality degradation using hardware acceleration. I heard if you have a chip older than haswell you will be a quality drop, but I’m not sure how that works with Xeons, especially with my first gen 2670’s.

So, would it be worth grabbing a gpu to passthrough for hardware acceleration and would I see a quilty drop by adding one?

2
3

I actually watched that earlier but closed it right before the 4k update, so that answered the first part of my question. But he didn’t mention anything about a quality drop, since it seems he just tested as many transcodes as possible.

4

My experience with QSV is great. Nvidia should be as well.

5

maybe you should just avoid transcoding in the first place by having more compatible media and/or clients that can direct play your content?

most xeons do not have any gpu for quicksync support.

there are other options besides the p2k

its worth it to most people, but refer to my first sentence you should try to avoid transcoding in the first place.

most can’t see any quality difference, but really what does it matter any transcode will be losing some quality whether you can see it or not.

this may or may not be helpful, see @ Plex, 4k, transcoding, and you - aka the rules of 4k - a FAQ

6

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.