Hey everyone, I’m building a new server to run Jellyfin (with a few other services like Pi-hole) and I’m stuck on GPU or CPU transcoding.
My main concern is smooth 4K HDR transcoding for 1 stream. I’ve been reading mixed advice online – some people say a strong CPU with good single-core performance can handle it, while others recommend a dedicated GPU.
Should I focus my budget (~$1000AUD/$658USD) on a good CPU, or spend some of it on a dedicated GPU?
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Like others said an Intel CPU with iGPU, alternatively the cheapest Intel Arc GPU (A380?) supports the latest spec of Intel QSV as well.
A310 is the cheapest.
I wonder how well it does for transcoding on older computers without ReBAR, since apparently gaming on it is straight out broken without ReBAR. As in, it would actually freeze for a second or so every now and then.
Encoding engine basically requires it, so you’d need to implement a hack or something. https://www.reddit.com/r/IntelArc/comments/189cgsm/intel_arc_h265_encoding_performance_and_resizable/
Shit, this kinda screws with my plans to use the A380 as a transcoding card for my server.
same with all modern pcie 4.0 or higher gpus
rebar is now standard
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/geforce-rtx-30-series-resizable-bar-support/
You can enable REBAR on older machines with a UEFI hack.
It’s been part of the PCI spec for ages but Nvidia and AMD only started using it recently.
You can check out the tool here.