I’ve been searching around here and the Reddit Plex forum, and surprisingly I can’t find anyone asking/answering this question. If I have multiple GPU’s (2 nVidia Quadro’s, or an intel QS and a nVidia, etc) and have many steams going at once, will Plex use both GPU’s to encode?
My Quadro card can do 2 streams at once (K600), and I don’t have an Intel QS cpu (Xeon) to test this with. Though about getting a second Quadro card to get 4 HW streams at once. FFMPEG-wise this seems totally doable, as it can distinguish between the GPU’s just fine. So can Plex do it?
If not I was going to open a feature request as I didn’t see anything in there either. Just a bunch of people that want to choose which GPU gets used, not use both.
From my experience, they only use one. I used to have a gtx 460 and a gtx 1050. I though I could use the 1050 for 4k and and the 460 for non 4k transcoding. But when it actually transcode only the 1050 is utilized or maybe there is not enough clients using the my server therefore plex don’t use the it, either way I never seen it being utilized.
I am wondering the same.
there are few scenarios I can think of:
1- using the igpu to do 10 streams but it reach 100% on 4 streams so the extra 6 will be offloaded on a discrete gpu lets say GTX 1080 Ti
2- have a gtx 1080Ti’s in sli or 2 of them without the sli bridge (can work even if u dont connect the sli bridge but they won’t combine efforts on single game but can be done for example to render in maya on gpu1 and run the game on gpu2) so maybe plex don’t support sli but support multi gpu’s so can be used if we dont connect the sli bridge
2.5- same as scenario 2 but must connect the gpu’s with sli
3- have gtx 1080 Ti and another GTX 1050 or quadro p2000 , we can chose to make it run on one of them from control panel : Hardware Acceleration Multi-GPU
so if it will be forced to run on gpu#2 P2000 , its not what u are asking for.
4- same as 3rd scenario but we force it to use gpu#1 GTX 1080 instead of the p2000but that actually don’t limit it to that gpu and maybe it will start using gpu#2 once resources on #1 hit 90%+ its not what u are asking for.
5- without touching scenario 3+4 , simply we don’t tinker in the control panel the plex server will go for gpu#1 always and once it reach the 90% usage it will do any trancoding on another gpu similar to what happens already as the option in Hardware transcoding: as far as I know when u turn on the Hardware transcoding option on it will start using gpu’s first till it reach 90%+ then it starts going to cpu for transcoding.
what I really wish for is we get a full Settings tab in the software to be able to chose all these things:
we can chose what to use.
limit it to certain gpu or use multi gpu’s also choosing priority which one to use first
limit it to use cpu only then jump to gpu#1or2 or quicksync(user choice)
limit it to use gpu as much as possible then go to to gpu#1or2 or quicksync(user choice)
i think all these options will make plex server a beast of a media server.
