New G AMD cpus for Plex?

OsaSoft · February 10

Hey all,

I saw the shortcirquit on the 8600G and after a bit of googling saw it seems to have a great encoding performance as well as AV1 support. However Ive also seen that Plex seems to not play well witg AMD gpus...

My question is, do you think it is a reasonable upgrade? Currently my home server is running on an i7 8700 (proxmox + plex in ct), or would my money be better spent chucking a low-mid nvidia gpu in there instead?

Needfuldoer · February 10

I think Plex's stance on AMD hardware acceleration is "maybe it works your mileage may vary", and they still only certify Quick Sync Video and NVENC. It looks like they don't even support Intel Arc yet, which is a shame.

Personally I went for a Pascal generation Quadro card. NVENC sessions are software limited to five concurrent sessions by the drivers on GeForce cards (thanks, artificial market segmentation), but I think you can still unlock that with a driver patch. (The Quadro and Tesla cards don't have this stock limitation.)

Ada Lovelace (RTX 4000) is the first Nvidia generation to do AV1, but there's full HEVC support going back to Turing (GTX 16xx).

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new

OsaSoft · February 12

On 2/10/2024 at 12:55 PM, Needfuldoer said:

I think Plex's stance on AMD hardware acceleration is "maybe it works your mileage may vary", and they still only certify Quick Sync Video and NVENC. It looks like they don't even support Intel Arc yet, which is a shame.

Personally I went for a Pascal generation Quadro card. NVENC sessions are software limited to five concurrent sessions by the drivers on GeForce cards (thanks, artificial market segmentation), but I think you can still unlock that with a driver patch. (The Quadro and Tesla cards don't have this stock limitation.)

Ada Lovelace (RTX 4000) is the first Nvidia generation to do AV1, but there's full HEVC support going back to Turing (GTX 16xx).

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new

Thanks, that seems pretty in line with everything Ive read elsewhere. Guess Ill just go with an nvidia gpu if i can find a cheap one. I rarely have more than two streams, let alone encodes running at the same time, so even the nvenc limitation doesnt really bother me

Lurick · February 12

Just keep in mind Plex does NOT support AV1 transcoding (at least as of now from what I can find and recall), there are mixed results on if they plan to ever support this or not, only playback of already encoded AV1 videos.

voyager_ · February 12

3 hours ago, OsaSoft said:

Thanks, that seems pretty in line with everything Ive read elsewhere. Guess Ill just go with an nvidia gpu if i can find a cheap one. I rarely have more than two streams, let alone encodes running at the same time, so even the nvenc limitation doesnt really bother me

Check out some older Quadro cards. I bought a k2200 a couple years ago for $100 and it will handle multiple streams and I've thrown 4k at it to transcode and it handles it just fine. Im sure you could get a newer one for pretty cheap. The p2000 is in the neighborhood of 150-200 on ebay. It's single slot and doesn't require extra power.