Hoping someone might know the answer to this question. I have a desktop with 2-GPUs (2x Nvidia 1070). I would like to use one for gaming and the other one I use for converting my collection to H265 and doing transcoding on the fly. I want to know how does Plex chose the video card to do hardware transcoding? Is there an option to chose this? I might be playing a game but someone might be watching a show that needs to be transcoded (have an old nexus 10 tablet which does not support H265). I do not want the transcoding to be done on the same GPU.
Here is how I did it and it appears to be working:
Go into the Nvidia control panel (right click on the desktop)
Go to Manage 3D settings
Select Program settings
Click “Add”
browse to c:\program files (x86)\plex\plex media server (or wherever you have it installed).
Choose “Add Current Folder”
When you are back to the list of settings you can adjust, change “CUDA - GPUs” to select the GPU you wish to assign to plex.
I also turned “optimize for compute performance” to On. Not sure if that makes any difference, but i figured why not.
I restarted plex and verified through Task manage that my GPU 1 was being used when I did a stream that uses HW encoding.
@mridahodan said:
I finally figured out how to do this today.
Here is how I did it and it appears to be working:
Go into the Nvidia control panel (right click on the desktop)
Go to Manage 3D settings
Select Program settings
Click “Add”
browse to c:\program files (x86)\plex\plex media server (or wherever you have it installed).
Choose “Add Current Folder”
When you are back to the list of settings you can adjust, change “CUDA - GPUs” to select the GPU you wish to assign to plex.
I also turned “optimize for compute performance” to On. Not sure if that makes any difference, but i figured why not.
I restarted plex and verified through Task manage that my GPU 1 was being used when I did a stream that uses HW encoding.
Hi can you please post your Nvidia settings for plextranscoder.exe ?
I have 2 GTX 960 configured with SLI, and when I turn on “optimize for compute performance” after few seconds hw transcode process crashes.
I also noticed that with the above option disabled, even if I select to use both GPUs, only 1 is used at 25%.
If I switch to GPU 1 it uses GPU 1 correctly but 25%, if I switch to GPU 2, it uses 1 for encoding and 2 for decoting both @25%.
And can not use “optimize for compute performance” which I think is a generic option for example if you need to mine bitcoins…But I only need to transcode .mkv to .mp4 in order to keep files already transcoded and avoid transcoding when a device start a 4k .mkv file…
@dedo1987 that is very interesting find there. I have a 5960x with a gtx 1080 and I have plex on it with about 20 friends and family remote streaming. I was glad they finally used HW transcoding to off load from my cpu. But since I also game with my son on the same system, it would be awesome that I can now buy a second gtx 1080 for split the work and still game with no sacrifice on either gaming or Plex. Hope Plex can optimize multi gpu setup. Also bad because this can also add a spike to gpu pricing, hope not as bad as bit mining.
Setting “CUDA - GPUs” to my desired graphics card didn’t work despite several restarts, but after I set also set “OpenGL rendering GPU” to the desired GPU, and “Power Management Mode” to “Prefer maximum performance” it did the trick.
For reference I’m on Windows 10, and my preferred GPU for Plex is a Quadro P2000, and my other GPU is 2070 Super. It also worked without having the P2000 plugged into a display, which I have read in other threads was required as Plex automatically went to the primary display, but the Nvidia Control Panel workaround seems to have resolved that.
The question still hasn’t been fully answered. How do I run plex on a dedicated server using multiple gpu’s? If it is not possible yet will someone from plex answer the question of will it ever?
Like the OP i’m trying to get a 2nd GPU to do the workload that the 1st GPU was originally doing. I am installing an older RX570 that I got for $80 for a few different reasons into the second PCI E 16 slot. I’d like to force all HW transcoding to use that HP instead of using my Nvidia RTX 2060 Super which I primarily use for gaming and Folding @ Home. Some of the posters above mentioned using GE Force to select affinity for specific programs. Has anyone tried this with AMD?
Current Config minus new RX 570
Mobo AsRock B365M Pro 4 Variant
I7-9700F
4 x 8 GB 2666
1 x Gigabyte RTX 2060 Super Windforce Over Clock
1 x 1 TB Intel P660 M.2
1 x SATA 6GB WD SSD (480 GB Primary Drive)
1 x 7200 RPM WD HD 1TB
1 x 8TB External (Plex Storage)
I’d like to bump this because I’m also curious about this. I’ve been thinking about making a dedicated low power transcode server and really want to know if it would be possible to use multiple forms of HW transcode at once. If not currently then can the devs take a look at doing this?
My thoughts are basically using a really low power QuickSync based platform and throwing on a Quadro or two to get more streams. If Plex would completely ignore QuickSync after putting in a GPU though then this would be a waste.
It seems like it should be easy enough to have a bit of code to check load using nvidia-smi and balance it.
I think that answers my question. Apparently Plex isn’t capable of doing that. I was looking into this myself. I might try to make a tool to fix that but I didn’t even know if that’s possible yet.
Just added the Nvidia P4000 GPU to the mix with RTX 2080 Super and see if Plex would work with 2 GPUs, well…, Plex only using 1 GPU for transcoding. Just for the sake of testing, I’ve set Plex Media Server to only use the P4000 GPU for transcoding it is working correctly. The other Nvidia RTX-2080 Super card is set for other video processing and it is working as well, Plex didn’t use this card for transcoding at all. I have no display connecting to the P4000 GPU at this time. I hope this help someone want to do this way. BTW, I’ve also unrestricted the RTX-2080 Super limitation to for more than 2 transcoding and it is also working. Here are some pix to show some details.
What is that program you’re using to change 3D settings?
I just installed a 2060 KO last night with plans to use that for primary graphics as well as Plex transcoding. I have an i7-8700, and I also have the integrated graphics still enabled in my BIOS, because i plan to dedicate it to my surveillance software which relies on QSV. Don’t want to take anything away from surveillance by using iGPU for Plex or other tasks. Obviously a 2060 KO gets me more options as far as transcoding abilities, but it remains to be seen how the quality compares to QSV. I am still curious about the possibility of using both QSV and my 2060 KO for Plex tasks if anyone has a surefire way to configure that.
