Is QuickSync still required for HW Transcodes? Ryzen CPU, Nvidia GPU Possible?

General Discussions
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First off, I’m a little unsure if having a processor that supports QuickSync is actually still a requirement. According to the official hw transcoding page it is

On the other hand, at the bottom of that post, in the linux section it has NVDEC/NVENC as valid encoding/decoding engines. I also found this reddit thread:

Uh, I thought you need an intel cpu with quicksync to offload to a GPU.

No, you don’t. They way that they documented it is confusing. Quicksync is just intels implementation of gpu transcoding for their cpus that have integrated GPUs, but you don’t need an Intel CPU to use hardware accelerated encoding with an Nvidia or amd card.

I’d like to throw out some specs and see if it will be able to leverage the hardware for transcodes

  • Plex Pass
  • Ubuntu server 18.04
  • AMD Ryzen 3600
  • GeForce GTX 1660 Ti (with patched drivers to allow more than 2 transcodes)

Will I need to add another barebones video card or will plex allow transcoding through the same card initialized as the default display?

If this is indeed possible, could we get the very widely referenced HW Transcoding reference page updated?

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No quicksync is not required.
Yes documentation should be clearer.
Plex uses only the primary display for transcoding. It will fail over to cpu (not a second gpu).

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If I may add?

I wrote the packaging & startup support which adds nVidia GPU card support to Ryzen-based CPUs (QNAP was what I did the work on for QNAP systems)

If the nVidia driver modules are in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and are revision 418.30 or higher, PMS will be able to communicate with the nVidia GPU.

Whether that GPU card is capable of the transcoding requested, is another matter. (see the nVidia published capabilities for details)

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Thank you for the quick replies! This is great news with AMD leading the cpu game.

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