Transcoding with an Intel Celeron - any good?

[WBoweIII]

Hardware transcoding quality

I just upgraded my Plex server to a I5-9600K and have hardware transcoding working just fine. Unfortunately when its enabled the quality of the video is absolutely horrible. Some movies are blocky and overall it looks like things are playing back from an old VHS. Is this normal and is there anything that works better? I know quality is lower with hardware transcoding but this is shockingly bad. Will adding an NVidia card improve this or is hardware transcoding just that bad? Thanks.

I suggest you check out this thread. There are many of us having problems with HW Transcoding & Intel QuickSync right now. In my case it is unusable. It would be a shame to purchase hardware that does not have the horsepower to transcode without QuickSync only to find out its too bad to use.