Hardware Acceleration - nVidia P2000

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Hello all,

I’m planning on upgrading my ESXi platform, and am wondering if my non-Quicksync Intel Xeon E5-2650v2 dual processors will stop me from potentially using an nVidia Quadro P2000 GPU to handle some hardware acceleration for encoding and decoding.

I’ve read several posts online which seem to indicate just to get hardware acceleration to work, even when using a nVidia GPU and not the iGPU, requires a Quicksync capable processor. Is that true?

Components:
Gigabyte GA-7PESH2
Dual Intel Xeon E5-2650v2 processors
128GB ECC RAM

Passmark of this is going to be somewhere around 19,000. I’d like to be able to handle H.265 so I’ve been expecting to add a nVidia Quadro P2000 GPU, but before I pull the trigger, I’d appreciate knowing it will work in a Windows VM on ESXi 6.5+.

Thanks in advance for any guidance on this.

ST

2

If you take a look at the official help article, it mentiones GPU encoding in case

your Windows computer also has a dedicated graphics card,

Which would very much confirm your suspicion that you need a Quicksync capable processor and a GPU in order to use GPU encoding.

3

Thanks for that - I’m sure I read that article but missed the emphasis on the ‘also’.

While not the answer I was hoping for, I appreciate the confirmation!

ST

4

Confusing, but that isn’t what that sentence means.
Let me answer it a different way. With a P2000 passed to the Windows 10! VM, it will Encode video, the CPU will do the decode. The debate is over trying to get the P2000 to do both tasks decode/encode which seems to involve voodoo, the right version of the drivers matched to the right version of Win 10. Adding to it are the people trying to get some combination of the Intel GPU working with the P2000.

So, do you know how to pass a video card in VMware to a VM?

5

Yes - I know how to pass through hardware to a VM. Never done this with a GPU, but have done so many times with LSI raid cards etc…

I assume the process is similar?

6

Passing the GPU through is the same as passing through any other PCI device in ESXi, so you should not encounter any issues there. :+1:

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