Let’s say the the GPU can comfortably support x streams. When hardware acceleration for transcoding is enabled, does it start to use CPU for a few streams after x streams are already running on GPU? Or if hardware acceleration is enabled, no transcoding is ever done on CPU?
I would like it to use CPU if GPU resources are exhausted but I am having a hard time testing it.
I did some very old testing of this ~3 years ago and at that time once the GPU was maxed out it didn’t fall back to using CPU.
The current releases will fall back to cpu when gpu fails.
This is easily seen on linux with nvidia cards, once the number of streams exceed video ram, plex will start hitting the cpu.
I would like to know this too. TeknoJunky… does Linux run plex differently… or in other words… if linux allows the CPU to be used after the GPU is maxed… does that mean it does the same thing on a windows system?
I have a decent CPU and a crappy GPU. I want to make sure that when hardware acceleration is enabled that it doesn’t use just my GPU.
linux and windows are different yes, they have different driver models and windows/linux graphics implementations are different.
I think previously, plex used windows direct x based gpu transcoding, but with the recent transcoder update can now use nvidia hardware more directly.
What or how that changes or affects gpu transcoding between windows/linux, I don’t know.
decent cpu/gpu are all relative to what your trying to transcode.
if its 4k/hevc, then just about any cpu can be brought to its knees.
for gpu, it needs to support the codecs you want to transcode.
x264 has been around forever and cpus have been doing that fine for the most part.
x265/hevc, is much much harder, and this where gpu can excel, as long as the gpu is new enough to support x265/hevc.
in any case, I think it is safe to say that plex will fail over to cpu once the gpu is exhausted.
this should be easily testable, just open a bunch of web browsers to @ Plex Web and start streaming various videos that cause transcoding.
sooner or later either your pc will give out or the server will.
you can watch the plex web dashboard to see whether HW is being used it will have (hw) next to the video/audio transcode info.
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