That’s just a wild guess - do you have Desktop Experience feature enabled?
It’s built into 2016 when you install it with a GUI…
When you install Windows Server 2016 using the Setup wizard, you can choose between Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server (Server with Desktop Experience). The Server with Desktop Experience option is the Windows Server 2016 equivalent of the Full installation option available in Windows Server 2012 R2 with the Desktop Experience feature installed.
I’m having the same problem. Running Windows Server 2016 with a few VMs. Every time someone streams or downloads for offline use, my CPU goes through the roof and I can’t get HW acceleration to work. I’m also running a headless server which I RDP to, but I’ve connected a “live” hdmi cable to my amp, and I tried not RDP’ing and hooked everything up. My CPU supports HW acceleration, so it seems to be something Windows (2016?) Server specific Would love to get this working!
If you want to access the GPU on a VM via Hyper-V you going to need RemoteFx,
You need to activate this on the hyper-v side, and then add a RemoteFx 3d video adapter to the Vm… But even with all of this I’m really not sure it’s going to work.
(unless it has changed recently) in windows, plex will use whichever gpu is configured for the default/primary display.
that means if the intel is the default display, then it will use that gpu. conversely if the nvidia is the default display it will use the nvidia gpu.
You can choose which display is the default/primary, by clicking the desktop > display settings > click whichever display screen # at the top, then scroll down to ‘make this my main display’.
You will very likely need a physical display connected to each gpu to do this.
@CuriosityKills, I might have . But that doesn’t help, I know .
To clarify - I run mine on an Intel CPU with Quicksync and it works - partially.
I have it set up as a service, with HW transcoding disabled, because it crashes PMS completely, when I try to play something using HW transcoder. But if I RDP to the server as the user the service is setup on, it works without issues. There’s an issue opened for that, but the “workaround” didn’t work for me.
You can see the issue thread here: Hardware Acceleration · Issue #36 · cjmurph/PmsService · GitHub .
Now, I haven’t had Media Foundation nor DirectPlay installed. Today I installed those and the behavior didn’t change.
EDIT: I forgot to mention - I’m running it baremetal too.
What kind of hypervisor do you use, @B33rdy?
Just FYI, HW acceleration is working fine for me under Server 2016 (Essentials). Until I saw this thread I didn’t know it wasn’t supposed to be working.
I’m running bare metal with an i7-8700. The difference might be that I’m using a Quadro card (P2000) and not a GeForce card. I have WMI sensors set up on my instance of PRTG that monitors GPU load and encoder sessions and I can definitely see the activity when there’s transcoding in Plex happening. Unfortunately a lot of my streaming activity happens as DirectPlay, so I’m not really pushing the card at all. I think 4 was the most so far.
I don’t run it as a service because it was my understanding that HW transcoding didn’t work because it requires user sessions. I rarely have to restart PMS and I have autologin enabled in case I need to reboot the server so it’ll come up right away.
I don’t use a dummy plug on it, but it’s on a KVM so maybe that’s enough load to keep the card from timing out.
Thank you! I’ve been trying to figure this out for months and this was right on the money. My Dell R720xd has a built in basic 2d adapter that was set to default. I got a simple dummy plug for my P2000 and disabled the other display and now I can finally HW decode again.
I am in a bad situation where I just added a P400 Quadro to my system, installed drivers, connected a monitor to my server, made it main display (connected to quadro card), I have media foundation enabled, and I am still not able to use hardware acceleration.
Would love to get this working!
. But that doesn’t help, I know 
.