My current graphics card is a Gigabyte GV-N1030OC-2GI Nvidia GeForce GT 1030 OC 2G. I have my Plex Server set up on my PC and view thru a Nvidia Shield Pro 2019 as the client.
For the purposes of picture quality and performance would I benefit by upgrading to a Gigabyte Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card?
I have the settings on the 1030 card as resolution 3840x2160 (native), refresh rate 60HZ, Color Depth 32-bit (the highest the card will allow), output color depth 12bpc, output color format ycbcr 422 (the card will not allow me to set to 444 at 60hz) and output dynamic range can only be set to limited.
Do not use the Radeon GPU.
Are you currently transcoding video when watching with the Shield? You can monitor playback via Plex Dashboard → Now Playing.
The Shield Pro is one of the most capable Plex clients. It direct plays most media. It is rare that you will need to transcode when viewing with the Shield (unless streaming remotely and transcoding due to bandwidth limits).
Plex has no official support for AMD GPUs. See Using Hardware Accelerated Streaming.
A transcode has two parts, decoding from the current format and encoding to the desired format.
The GT1030 has no encoding capability. It can decode 4K HDR media. See Nvidia Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix.
If you are transcoding, the GT1030 is only decoding the video. The encode will be handled by the CPU or Intel Quick Sync Graphics, if present in the CPU.
Reference: Using Hardware Accelerated Streaming
Reference: Nvidia Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix
Thank you for your reply and the information. I confess that my understanding of how plex interacts with my PC where I have the server and my Nvidia Shield client is weak. The image I am seeing on the Shield client is stunning and looking at my Denon app I see that I am streaming in original formats including Dolby Vision and lossless audio which has been my original objective. I just upgraded my PC from an old Dell Optiplex 990 Mini Tower to a new build my son assisted me with that includes an AMD Ryzen™ 5 5600 CPU. The point of the upgrade was determining that my old Dell, was stretched as a server with various bottlenecks that were inherent in the hardware. I’m not a gamer and at 70 will probably not jump into gaming at this juncture so upgrading the GPU didn’t seem to be a priority. My lack of understanding about how this all works puts my on thin ice in the decision process on optimizing my system and making improvements. Thank you again for your help.
That’s a nice CPU. It should easily handle anything Plex related. I would not worry about the video card unless you start running into problems when transcoding video.
With the Shield and Denon, you should not need to transcode anything.
My setup: Shield Pro (2015) ← HDMI → Denon AVR-X4300H ← HDMI → LG B7 OLED
I never transcode video or audio. The only restriction I have is my Shield is too old to support Dolby Vision. The current model, released in 2019, handles DV nicely.
