Hardware Acceleration ticked but CPU gets to 100% while GPU is <20%

[anguy079]

My cpu is constantly being used for transcoding from 1080p -->720p or SD. Under task manager “PlexTranscoder.exe” will be at 40-60% while GPU will be at 0-10%. I have lifetime plex pass, dashboard does say hw transcoding. Quick Sync has been enabled in bios and updated drivers.

Here are the specs for my setup
i5-7400
16GB RAM
256GB SSD for OS & Plex Metadata
external HD for media
Nvidia GTX 1060 3GB

Updated Plex Media Server, DLNA on, Relay off. I tried troubleshooting on reddit here but couldn’t find a solution.
Here is a link to my pastebins I just uploaded a little earlier. here.

I thought my issue was that it wasn’t transcoding properly, but another reddit user says that there seems to be an error with hw encoding in general since he found this in my log “opening hw device failed”

[anguy079]

Just wanted to update. I am able to use iGPU quicksync but it shows about 30% usage from iGPU AND about 35% usage from CPU from plextranscoder.exe I also have a laptop with an i7-1065g7 so I installed plex media server on there as well with a 1080p video and I still had iGPU and CPU both at ~30%. No idea how to get all of the transcoding off onto the iGPU.

[KarlDag]

From my experience, CPU usage will never be 0% even using GPU accelerated transcoding.

Also, look into the dashboard. When you see "1080p h264 (hw) - 720p h264 (hw)

If you don’t see “(hw)” twice, it means either the decoding or the encoding part isn’t supported by your gpu. Usually it’s the decoding of a file with an unsupported format, ie. HEVC 10bit.

I’m not sure if Plex supports Nvidia GPUs now, but that gpu doesn’t support as many formats as the iGPU on your cpu. Emby let’s you choose which GPU to use, I don’t think Plex does.

[anguy079]

Thanks for replying. For some reason this pretty much happens with both the iGPU or the GPU enabled. I’m thinking i did something wrong.

[TeknoJunky]

as you can see ‘1408’ has (hw) for both decode and encode.

GPU only helps VIDEO, everything else including audio still goes through cpu.

so you will continue to see cpu usage.

you can try disabling gpu transcoding in plex, and compare your cpu usage then, you should see your cpu usage stay much higher.

[anguy079]

Based off of other threads, I thought that the GPU is supposed to do most of the transcoding. Would audio alone really require the same amount as video?

Is there any solution you would suggest so that I don’t encode the audio? Is there a certain audio format I should obtain in the future to avoid audio transcoding?

[TeknoJunky]

you cannot compare the % load of the cpu vs the gpu load.

in the screenshot, one video is being remuxed and the other is being transcoded (video via gpu, audio via cpu).

the i5-7400 is not exactly a high end powerful cpu either, so the cpu load maybe you should click the ‘cpu%’ header in the task manager and see what other processes are using cpu (transcoder is only using 30% of that 71% in use).

also, the performance tab can show you a little bit more detail;

this is not a plex transcode, its using folding at home for compute on 2 gpu

but as you can see, you can set the graphs for video decode/encode to see that each is working.

here is another shot, you can see the 3 FAH cores working, one is CPU only, and the other 2 are GPU only, yet there is still cpu% assigned to them.

[anguy079]

I see. So just wanted to confirm that hardware transcoding is working properly on my pc then.

I’ll try again to enable the iGPU since it seems like that’s what is suggested for my current specs.

[TeknoJunky]

yup, as you can see by the graphs, both encode and decode are being utilized.

it is probably worth your time to see whether the cpu load is lower via the intel gpu or the nvidia gpu.

be advised though, plex will only use one or the other, not both.

the intel 630 alone should be plenty for most people’s needs, you could save power by removing the 1060 and reusing elsewhere if you needed.

[anguy079]

much appreciated! I’ll try it out.

[JuiceWSA]

… and even my AMD Radeon R9 380 gets into the action on a video transcode - sharing duties with the CPU so neither does much more than 20%.