Nvidia GPU Transcoding causes driver crashes whilst gaming

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Server Version#: 1.31.3.6819
Player Version#: Any player

Hey, this is my third attempt (the first two were on reddit) to see if someone has any idea on how I might be able to fix my issue.
I have been running my plex server for friends and family for 7 years, but only in the last year have I seen this behaviour.

Basically, every time I am playing a game and someone streams something from my server that requires transcoding I run the risk of crashing the game with event viewer showing a nvlddmkm error.

This, however, only happens if someone is playing something from the middle or is jumping around beyond what is already transcoded. So for example if they start playing something, all is good, then they skip the intro to a show and that causes the game to crash. Windows event viewer reports nvlddmkm error, but I have exhausted google’s solutions for this matter.

This does NOT happen with CPU transcoding.

I will give you two examples:

Example 1: (No crash) I am in the middle of playing some Red Dead Redemption, someone starts transcoded movie from the beginning and watches it from beginning to end, zero problems.

Example 2: (Crash) I am in the middle of playing some Red Dead Redemption, someone starts a movie or TV show halfway through an episode, immediate game crash.

I have tried multiple things, from disabling GPU encoding and leaving only decoding on to resetting GPU clocks to stock or even lower than stock to playing around with nvidia inspector to see if there is anything that can be changed in order to avoid this behaviour.
This happens with any game not just the one I used as an example

I know it is quite specific to my situation and not everyone’s server is also their gaming pc, but at this point I am out of ideas and would really like to see if someone can relate to this issue at all.

Thanks

2

Since it happens when simply decoding, without encoding, it is probably not a performance issue at least.

Buggy graphics drivers perhaps?

What happens if you make the game a window, then play a video file in any player with hardware decoding activated, and seek around in that? Does that also crash the game? Try pushing it and play several videos at once while the game is on, etc.

Also, since you mention rdr2, have you tried switching rendering to something else? Under advanced graphics options.

Edit: ah you were playing the first rdr? Scratch that last part then.

3

Hey! First, thanks for trying to help!

Some clarification is needed from my part.
Disabling gpu encoding and leaving decoding on causes crashes just the same as leaving both options on.
I have tried every recent available gpu driver with no changes, and I have also cleaned installed the gpu drivers in an attempt to fix this issue.
Also, when it comes to the game used to crash it doesn’t make a difference if I am playing a Vulkan api game, DX12 or DX11, any game can cause this issue.

At this point, I would be happy if I found someone running a similar server to mine and attempted to reproduce this scenario on their machine. (a windows based server that is also used to game with an nvidia gpu for transcoding)

A full windows re-install is the only thing I haven’t done, but given that I don’t have any other problem with the machine, I think there is a good chance that it would be a waste of time.

One final piece of information is that I do some game streaming quite often using gpu encoding for that and never had any crashes of the game or stream whilst doing so, making the crashes when transcoding with plex even more weird

4

Your use case doesn’t fit in with Plex’s.

They develop and test without thinking that the GPU would be in use by another application, and lets face it Games make serious demands on the GPU. Plex has recently gone down the path of including driver libraries that may be incompatible with what you are running. Outside of a second GPU to separate Plex from Gaming I don’t see what you can do. If you have an Intel CPU with onboard GPU you can enable it and make it the default for Plex. Games will usually default to a discrete GPU. Either that build a second box dedicated to Plex.

5

I understand all that, but I also don’t think that my use case is extremely niche.
Surely a lot of people use their system for multiple use cases and lack the interest in building a dedicated system just for plex and other server applications.
And when you quote that plex “has recently gone down the path of including driver libraries that may be incompatible with what you are running” what does this mean? Do you know of any specific changes that have been made in the last year or so that would possibly be the root to my issue?

6

You would have to revert back to a 1.28 version to avoid all the changes but probably the most relevant one is Plex Media Server 1.30.0.6359 - New Transcoder Preview.

7

Unfortunately, no changes after rolling back to 1.28.
I definitely feels like when a game is close to maxing out GPU resources and a transcode jumps forward for whatever reason, the game will hard lock and crash. The expected behaviour and the way I have seen this behave in the past has been a reduced performance of the game so that they transcode can coexist, but that does not happen at all

8

Anyone else has a similar setup to mine that would be willing to do some testing to see if the issue is replicable in a different machine?

9

Bumping this one final time just to make sure someone out there has a similar setup and can try to recreate this issue

10

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.