Not a gamer, can’t afford a $$$ card, but looking for guidance on shopping for used ones. Hoping maybe some techheads out there got upgrades for xmas & are willing to sell a used GPU that has hw transcoding, but I need to know what keywords to look for. Checked Intel’s site, my Xeon CPU doesn’t have it. I have other services (SQL Server for one) running on this box too, but when transcoding happens it takes over the CPU (without touching the memory!) so I’m trying to offload some of these tasks to other hardware. This is a server only, nobody uses it directly except for administrative tasks that can’t be performed remotely. Appreciate any configuration advice and feature/brand/family shopping advice on GPUs. OR if there’s a capture device with built in transcoding that Plex and ffmpeg could tap? 4K capability not necessary.
Thanks in advance!
Plex Version 4.47.3 Lifetime Pass
Live TV & DVR with Hauppauge WinTV-DualHD and WinTV-HVR-2250 (4 tuners total)
System summary attached.
How many transcodes are you looking for? The typical recommendations are quadro p2XXX cards that allow for 20+ 1080P transcodes. Beyond that are the lesser quadro cards such as the P400, P600/620, P1000 etc.
Does your power supply have a plug for gpu power? Do you need a small form factor card? Single slot, double slot etc…
I’d likely go for a P1000 with 4GB of ram. Single slot card, no external power needed, can be had used for a fairly small price and I believe you can unlock it in your OS for more than just the 2 software limited transcodes. If you’d be transcoding 4k, I’d recommend p2000 or p2200 running under linux.
Thanks for replying! 2-ish concurrent streams would probably be enough. I’d just like them to be able to handle HD video processing and do a good job of encoding. Given that I’m not transcoding for enterprise, I doubt I’d need a separate power source (and my HP z420 doesn’t have one anyway). So it looks like you’re talking about Nvidia chipsets, and a few different manufacturers include it. Any preferences for brand?
I have a few expansion slots left open but can’t remember which ones right now. I guess I assumed I’d be swapping it out into the same slot as the current card, hadn’t really thought past that (though of course I know I have to make sure whatever I buy matches an available slot).
Sounds like even a lower level quadro p400 would do it for you. 2 1080 transcodes should be very easy on that card. If you unlock it, you could probably get a few more. Keep in mind audio will still be transcoded by your cpu.
Probably no reason to spend more on something better if all you want is to offload a couple of HD transcodes.
Elpamsoft has real world testing for the number of transcodes supported by specific cards.
As @Innw mentions, GTX and some Quadro cards have a limit of three simultaneous encodes (Nvidia limitation, recently raised from two). You can get around the limit with modified drivers.
Elpamsoft used such drivers where applicable and has additional info on their web page.
From what I’ve read, the newer the card, the better the quality of the transcode. So, Turing would have better quality than Pascal. The exception seems to be Volta cards. Apparently quality took a step back with that chipset.
