I noticed that Nvidia’s latest line of 50 series cards offers full support across all encoders/decoders. Since consumer grade Nvidia GPUs offer up to 5 simultaneous transcodes, I believe this makes RTX 5050 the best option in the market. As the price is roughly $250 USD. It’s also supposed to offer enhanced power management, and can reduce electricity.
Has anyone tried out an RTX 5050 and noticed improved performance?
Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix | NVIDIA Developer
Just get an Intel Arc. They are in some ways even better than the RTX cards when it comes to encoding. They have AV1 encoding for future-proofing for example.
I was using an Intel Arc A380 and while it worked very well, it couldn’t handle HDR properly, so I replaced it with a RTX 3060ti 16GB.
Choosing between B series with 2 media engines and the 3060 ti with only one and limited to 5(?) simultaneous transcodes was a difficult decision, but I ended up purchasing for the long term, tried and true solution.
I can’t speak to the newer Arc B series, but this is my experience moving from Intel to Nvidia.
The older Arc A380 seemed to handle more simultaneous transcodes with knees effort (IMO) but resulting video was higher bitrates and similar, but certainly not better, video than the new RTX.
From what I understand, Intel Arc does HDR in software, whereas Nvidia accomplished this in hardware - which should prove to be more efficient and rely on fewer drivers and framework builds to support HDR and other media transcoding features.
As much as I want to support Intel over Nvidia, I had to go with the better long term choice.
Of course much of this can change in the future, but I’ve been buying computer hardware for decades and the only thing you can count on is what the product can do at launch - not what is speculated about.
I’ve purchased far to many devices on future features and support that never comes or doesn’t live up to expectations.
On closing, features on the new 13th gen Nvenc like UHQ have amazing quality comparable to software at much faster speeds. (Ffmpeg, and Handstand advanced settings)
Eight.
See Nvidia Support Matrix → NVENC - Encoding → Max # of concurrent sessions. Decodes have no preset limit.
Note that some GPUs, such as the 1030, do not support encoding.
Sweet, I just double checked and yes, 8 simulations encodes!
I can now allow (some of) my anxiety related to failed streams or Handbrake boinking my Plex sessions.
Thanks @FordGuy61 for clearing that up. (I don’t know what I get the 5# from…)
@jfreiman Good to know about Intel Arc. I’ve seen mentions about Intel Arc capabilities, but haven’t seen any tangible real world testing on performance across all possibilities. I see a lot of theory focused mentions, based on specs or other posts. So this helps me a ton. Perhaps Intel can add further support and make the swap to Intel feasible (and more affordable).
@FordGuy61 thanks for the catch on the GPU matrix! 8 simultaneous encodes at $250 and all codecs supported is a solid way to go at current MSRP. That would easily future proof my streaming based on current codecs.
I appreciate the thoughts and input!
Good luck with choosing and I think you’ll be very happy with which ever one you choose and not look back.
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