When doing lots of transcoding, I’ve always used the Nvidia P2000 which can handle a bunch of transcoding if it occurs (I know, I try to tell my friends how to set it, but sometimes it happens).
My graphics card driver keeps crashing and I’m thinking my card is dying. Do I just buy another, or is there a similar priced one, more mordern that can also do the transcoding for the computer?
I don’t want one I have to hack graphics card drivers to allow more than 2 transcodes like I know was an issue in the past, not sure if it’s still relevant. Any advice is appreciated!
What hardware setup, operating system and environment are you running? Do you have height, length or power limits on the card (e.g. it must be low profile). Some of the more modern cards don’t have compatibility in certain situations. What type of media codecs are you using.
Generally the iGPU in modern Intel CPUs is a better way to go in most situations if you already have one. It minimises power use and doesn’t have an artificial restriction on the number of transcodes.
Your P2000 will decode most things except VP8, H.265 (HEVC) 4:4:4 and AV1. It will encode everything except AV1 however Plex doesn’t support this presently.
A Tesla based card will typically do everything except AV1.
You need Ampere onwards to decode AV1 and Ada Lovelace onwards to encode AV1.
The current nVidia drivers allow up to 8 concurrent transcode sessions without modifying the driver rather than 2.
Assuming you want the latest that does all codecs a RTX4060 may be okay if you are happy with 8 transcodes.
If you truly want unrestricted transcodes without driver modifications and full media codecs comparability then you’re looking at a workstation or server cards which are much more expensive. For the price of those you could probably get a modern CPU, motherboard and RAM combo which would would not only give you better HW transcoding capabilities than you presently have, but also provide a system upgrade.
However, you’ll be able to get more specific suggestions once you’ve outlined the information in my first paragraph so we understand what your limitations are.
