NVIDIA Quadro (Pascal) and "Unlimited" Hardware Encoding Streams?

General Discussions
1

Anyone with a NVIDIA Quadro able to test hardware transcoding with PMS in Windows to see if it’ll do more than two streams?

PMS release notes state that the “2 stream” limitation for NVIDIA encoding is set by the driver, which is true for most of their cards EXCEPT certain NVIDIA Quadro cards.

Reference: https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-gpu-support-matrix (Max # of
Streams)

For example, the Quadro M2000 has no artificial NVENC stream limit so my assumption is PMS would continue to use the NVIDIA GPU for hardware H.264 transcoding past two simultaneous encoders.

Any help or comments, greatly appreciated in advance. Thanks!

2

A little late but, I have a Quadro P2000 running with a Linux host and am able to do more than two encodes at once. As for codec support there seems to be some gaps in software support for what the card can encode and decode. So far only specific videos will encode via HW and there doesn’t seem to be any support for decoding using nvdec. So your millage may vary with how you’ll gain with an Quadro.

In my case the Dell server I run Plex on has no acceleration by default so the card does provide some benefit. Overall though when a video fits into the sweet spot of software support the reduction in CPU load is awesome. Here’s an overview of the load on the card while doing 3 encodes.

Sun Nov 26 19:58:12 2017
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 387.34                 Driver Version: 387.34                    |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  Quadro P2000        Off  | 00000000:42:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| 51%   45C    P0    26W /  75W |   1469MiB /  5053MiB |     14%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0      6686      C   /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex Transcoder     477MiB |
|    0      7093      C   /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex Transcoder     477MiB |
|    0      7447      C   /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex Transcoder     477MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
1 Like