Hello everyone, I am trying to decide between a Quadro P400 and a Radeon Pro W2100 for my Plex server, and I am wondering which one has better format support. I am leaning towards nVidia slightly at the moment as there seems to be a consensus that NVENC produces better quality output, but as this is a new feature in Plex there’s not much out there that I can draw on and Polaris 12 seems like the more powerful GPU overall.
First, a few specifications / constraints:
The media that I am mostly concerned with is 8/10 bit AVC 4K content, streaming to devices that are capable of handling 4K content but are not able to handle AVC, so there will be transcoding from AVC to H.264 at 4K resolutions.
The video card must be a true single-slot solution, hence the low-end pro cards. The board has lots of x8 PCIe, but only two x16 PCIe slots, and there’s enough other hardware in there that there is no room whatsoever for a fan shroud that pokes down into the airspace of the next slot down. I don’t think that there is a GeForce 1050 / Radeon RX 550 that wouldn’t consume too much space, and also they are more expensive.
The card will be running headless, passed through to the Plex VM by ESXi, so a 35W TDP appeals to me. Before anyone complains about this, no, I am not virtualizing the GPU - the Plex VM will have direct hardware access to it via VT-d.
The CPU is a Xeon E5-2687W, so there is plenty of horsepower there, but it still stutters decoding 10-bit content and the quality isn’t fantastic. The Plex VM currently has 12 vCPUs assigned, and the CPU is 8C/16T so in reality it has access to nearly everything with only a few hyperthreads reserved for other infrastructure.
The Plex VM is running on Windows Server 2012 R2. Assume that memory, disk space, and IOPS are infinite.
So, mostly, I am wondering what the real constraints / capabilities are between Polaris 12 and GP107. I am gathering that NVENC seems to produce better output, and that Plex supports NVDEC / NVENC directly instead of dealing with a Windows API to talk to the hardware driver, but the AMD GPU has the virtue of being somewhat more powerful as well as being slightly cheaper, and Polaris is certainly a good architecture.
Peoples of the internet, wat do?
