Hello. My CPU still seems to be doing the brunt of the work when it comes to transcoding.
Here’s the backstory:
I came across threads on r/Plex about unlocking nVidia cards to be able to have unlimited transcode streams, so I bought a 1050 Ti. I installed it, ran through the patch instructions and seemed to be good to go. But I noticed that my CPU was still being pegged at 100% when i tested a handful of transcoded streams. I was Windows 8.1 so I couldn’t view GPU usage via the task manager and didn’t know what to do.
I took to r/Plex about my issue and all i got was someone suggesting I upgrade to Windows 10. Anyways, so I decided to give it a try. Got a fresh install, reinstalled PMS and all that jazz. Then when it came time to test the streams, again my CPU is doing a lot of the legwork. Now granted, this time around I’m able to see the GPU usage in the Task Manager, but even still it was minimal compared to the CPU.
Does anyone know how to really get PMS to use my GPU for transcodes?
what cpu? the cpu must still process all the audio transcoding, along with server activity, network and disk io.
the gpu only helps with video decoding/encoding.
from your picture, the transcoder threads are utilizing the gpu (gpu:0) if you have more than one gpu (ie if your cpu has a built in gpu), you might need to disable or remove the old one, so the new one can be used.
My CPU is an i7 3770. I understand (to an extent) that those things must still be processed by the CPU - but at 100%?
I do only have the GPU I installed, but I suppose I can look in the BIOS and see if there’s some other GPU I need to disable. (That is where I’d like, right? lol).
I’ll take a look at that thread and see what I can find. I appreciate your response.
that cpu is too old to have an integrated gpu that work with plex, so unless you have 2 physical gpu cards installed, then the system should be using the 1050 correctly.
you also haven’t stated what exact content you were transcoding…
transcoding multiple full 4k hevc/x265 with truehd/atmos is going to use a lot of cpu (transcoding truehd is not trivial).
finally, you would not get any 4k transcodes on that cpu alone, let alone multiple streams, so that tells me the gpu transcoding is working as expected, and that the cpu load is coming from other than just the video transcoding.
Oh, so you think it is working right? Well, the content I was testing with was HEVC/x265 but only at 1080p. On one test all the audio was AAC so it was Direct Stream. The second test was with EAC3 transcoded to AAC, but again, I didn’t think that would run me CPU to 100%.
I don’t remote any 4K and am able to Direct Play locally, so since I can eliminate that scenario I’m still concerned that i’m not getting the full benefit from the GPU on other content.
I still need to take time to look at the console like the article you shared suggests. Would you recommend any other test cases to verify the GPU is doing what it’s supposed to, or to see if I can lessen the load from the CPU that I’m seeing?
