Planning a server upgrade so I tested transcoding performance on my workstation to give me an idea of how better hardware would perform. My workstation is an older beast with 2x platinum Xeons (48 core) and an Nvidia 5000 ada GPU.
I was testing Blu-ray rips with subtitles that require server side burn-in. Tested CPU only and then GPU accelerated transcoding. Both worked well and based on resource usage I figured I could handle 2-3 concurrent 4k transcodes easily.
The interesting thing I noticed was how much faster CPU transcoding time to play was compared to GPU.
You’d press play and it was basically instant, where the GPU took a few seconds to get going. I’m assuming this an ffmpeg thing, but thought it was interesting.
I’m also wondering if Plex will fallback to CPU transcoding when a GPU’s resources are maxed out with other transcodes. I don’t have enough devices (or time) to test this out so curious how that is handled.
