Which nvidia card for transcoding nvenc/265? (ts-877)

[CpX]

Hi, I have a ts-877 - I need a card for transcoding. I understand that the more ram, the better. But a lot of the cards for sale is 4GB at most.

There is a new line of cards, called 1650 are these better/worse than the original gtx 1060?

Does the new line called 20xx have a small form factor card worth using for transcoding? Does the newer NVENC technology benefit x265 transcoding?


I know @Trexx uses GPU: EVGA GTX 1060, ACX 2.0(1 Fan), 6GB, but for some reason this card took a rise in price.

Thanks again.

[dolbyman]

check the plex forums (if that is what you plan on using) .. many people hunt for the p2000 (?) cards for their unlimited encoding sessions (where as most other cards are locked to two sessions)

[wmadoss]

Or if you dont want to spend that much money on a quadro card there are ways to bypass the 2 limit session on GTX 1050 cards for instance.

[gggplaya]

Since you have a Ryzen 6 or 8 core processor in your NAS, I would just use CPU transcoding. It looks much better than any GPU transcoder, especially during fast scenes and with lower bitrates(remote streaming).

GPU's have a built in ASIC which is baked into the silicon that's used to perform a very specific task. This ASIC is identical with the GTX1050, 1060, 1070 and 1080, P2000 as well as the newer 1650. The P2000 has no limit of transcodes, while the rest have a 2 transcode limit. All of these GPU's will transcode exactly the same, whether it's a $150 video card or a $800 video card. Performance will be identical since you're using the NVENC ASIC and not the rest of the GPU silicon. The ASIC was upgraded for the Turing architecture, which does improve quality a little, but it's still inferior to CPU transcoding. The ASIC in the Turing GPU is found on the 1650SUPER(super version only), 1660, 2060, 2070, and 2080. As well as the Quadro turing cards.

GPU transcoding is fast because it uses a technique called macroblocking. https://www.lifewire.com/macroblocking- ... on-1847333 This technique separates the frame into large squares. Then decides which squares changed on the next frame and which remain the same. The ones that remain the same are left alone, which the frames that changed are rendered. By reusing so many frames, transcoding is significantly sped up. For slow moving dramas, this is fine. But for action movies, you can see the macroblocking during fast scenes and it looks terrible. In general, you can help alleviate macroblocking by using double the bitrate that you would normally use for CPU transcoding. Inside the home, it's fine because you can set your bitrate to 20mpbs, but outside the home this can be a problem at lower bitrates.

Since you have the 877, if you're not using all those cores for something else. I personally would use CPU transcoding. It looks much better. Especially if you have people outside your home watching Plex. 4mbps 720p actually looks decent with cpu transcodes, while 4mbps GPU transcodes look like a blocky mess.

[CpX]

gggplaya thanks for the long and detailed explanation.

I was looking at getting a 1660, just forgot to upgrade the thread. I just see a hard hit on the cpu nearly no matter what 265 content is used, therefore I thought a gpu would be better for this kind of content.

Thanks again Ggg-unitPlaya

[gggplaya]

No problem. Unless you need it for gaming, the 1660 won't transcode any better than the 1650 "SUPER", which is $160. They are a little hard to come by, as it's essentially a replacement for the 1050ti of the previous generation. It's the best value for low budget gamers and it was just released a few weeks ago. But for what you're doing, it's the cheapest video card with a Turing NVENC encoder. The 1660 uses the same encoder and won't perform any better or worse when it comes to transcoding. It'll only perform better in video games.

Remember it has to be the "SUPER" version. I really wish they would have stuck to using the "Ti" moniker.
https://www.newegg.com/msi-geforce-gtx- ... -_-Product

The non-SUPER 1650 uses the older Pascal/Volta generation NVENC Encoder.

I wouldn't worry about CPU usage for transcoding. Just set plex to "AUTO" quality and it'll use faster or slower algorithms depending on how much resources are available to transcode. It'll also transcode far far ahead until your buffer is full. Then pause (throttle) until you get deeper into the buffer, then transcode like crazy again until the buffer is full again......repeating the cycle. If you install PlexPy (Tautulli) on your NAS, you can see how fast your NAS is transcoding. It might be transcoding at say 4-5x speed, which would of course use all your CPU, until your buffer is full. Transcoding at 1x speed is all you need to break even with a single stream. Once more people jump onto plex, then Plex will automatically use threads to transcode all the streams equally. So say for instance, 4 people are transcoding at the same time. Then each stream might transcode at 1.2x speed. Either way, if you have a single stream or 4 streams, Plex will use all of your processing power.

Here's the page for PlexPY(Tautulli) on QNAP:
viewtopic.php?f=320&t=139879

[spikemixture]

Or if you dont want to spend that much money on a quadro card there are ways to bypass the 2 limit session on GTX 1050 cards for instance.

hi, where can I find those "ways"

[spikemixture]

Looks like wmadoss has no answer - or anyone else..

Yes I know it can be done on a win10 machine but this is a QNAP Forum.....

[jaysona]

Since you have a Ryzen 6 or 8 core processor in your NAS, I would just use CPU transcoding. It looks much better than any GPU transcoder, especially during fast scenes and with lower bitrates(remote streaming).
......

The problem with CPU transcoding is your are limited to only a few concurrent streams before the CPU maxes out.

If someone is going to drop some coin on a GPU for use in the NAS just for plex HW transcoding, they would probably be better off selling the AMD NAS, using the proceeds from the NAS sale and the money they would have used to purchase the GPU and buy an Intel based NAS and use Intel Quick Sync instead.

I have had 16 1080p concurrent streams being transcoded via Quick Sync and my CPU (i7-3770s) was barely above 5% since all transcoding was being done in the Quick Sync hardware.

[gggplaya]

Since you have a Ryzen 6 or 8 core processor in your NAS, I would just use CPU transcoding. It looks much better than any GPU transcoder, especially during fast scenes and with lower bitrates(remote streaming).
......

The problem with CPU transcoding is your are limited to only a few concurrent streams before the CPU maxes out.

If someone is going to drop some coin on a GPU for use in the NAS just for plex HW transcoding, they would probably be better off selling the AMD NAS, using the proceeds from the NAS sale and the money they would have used to purchase the GPU and buy an Intel based NAS and use Intel Quick Sync instead.

I have had 16 1080p concurrent streams being transcoded via Quick Sync and my CPU (i7-3770s) was barely above 5% since all transcoding was being done in the Quick Sync hardware.

Intel Quicksync looks the WORST in terms of video encoding. It's a blocky mess. Here's the order from best to worst looking CPU>Nvidia Turing > Nvidia Pascal/Volta > AMD VCE > Intel Quicksync. I tried Intel Quicksync with my 451+ NAS and 4570T intel processor in my thin desktop. It looked awful and was what turned me onto CPU transcoding instead, it's a night and day difference especially at low bitrates and fast moving scenes. If all your playback is at high bitrates inside the home, you might be OK. But if you're playback is remote at 4 or 8mbps, it's a blocky mess. Nvidia Turing H.264 encoding looks only a little worse than CPU encoding and Nvidia Turing H.265 encoding(not plex) looks very very close to CPU transcoding. Intel transcoding looks terrible, you can try it for yourself and compare the same movie against CPU transcoding.

The OP has a 6 or 8 core ryzen processor, he should be able to handle 4-6 full 1080p transcodes without issue and look the best doing it. An Nvidia GPU will only do 2 transcodes unless you find the workaround hack for it or buy a Quadro card.

[jaysona]

Intel Quicksync looks the WORST in terms of video encoding. It's a blocky mess. Here's the order from best to worst looking CPU>Nvidia Turing > Nvidia Pascal/Volta > AMD VCE > Intel Quicksync. I tried Intel Quicksync with my 451+ NAS and 4570T intel processor in my thin desktop. It looked awful and was what turned me onto CPU transcoding instead, it's a night and day difference especially at low bitrates and fast moving scenes. If all your playback is at high bitrates inside the home, you might be OK. But if you're playback is remote at 4 or 8mbps, it's a blocky mess. Nvidia Turing H.264 encoding looks only a little worse than CPU encoding and Nvidia Turing H.265 encoding(not plex) looks very very close to CPU transcoding. Intel transcoding looks terrible, you can try it for yourself and compare the same movie against CPU transcoding.

The OP has a 6 or 8 core ryzen processor, he should be able to handle 4-6 full 1080p transcodes without issue and look the best doing it. An Nvidia GPU will only do 2 transcodes unless you find the workaround hack for it or buy a Quadro card.

Over the past four years, I have not had and complaints or experienced any issues with quicksync and have never noticed any blockiness, even when sitting less than 2m from the screen which is 65" sin size. All my files are .x264 as that is the the only type Ivy Bride/Haswell can decode in hardware.

At some point as h.265 becomes more prevalent, I'll upgrade to a Coffee Lake or Ice Lake CPU, but I have still a couple of years, at least before that'll be necessary.

In my case plex does not need to perform any encoding, only decoding, as most of the players have issues with mkv, so the video file is decoded and streamed to the player as either MPEGTS or MP4.

Plex should never need to perform any sort of encoding, except in the case of a player not being able to play a VP8/9 or HEVC file for example. In that case I always re-encode my files using ffmpeg or similar tool first before making it available on plex.

[dolbyman]

I do hardware h265 to h264 transcoding (tvs-951x with hd610 qsv) and all resolutions/bitrates seem fine (transcoding when streaming to my android phone on the go, via vpn)

[jaysona]

I do hardware h265 to h264 transcoding (tvs-951x with hd610 qsv) and all resolutions/bitrates seem fine (transcoding when streaming to my android phone on the go, via vpn)

Kaby Lake - 'nuff said. Plus, trancoding for a mobile platform.

[dolbyman]

is kaby lake good or bad? ...I mean in terms of quality?

granted..that small screen (near 4k) is not the best reference to judge

[jaysona]

is kaby lake good or bad? ...I mean in terms of quality?

granted..that small screen (near 4k) is not the best reference to judge

Kaby Lake is good because it supports h.265 (HEVC) decoding in hardware, and encoding to a h.264 (AVC) in an mp4 container for use by the Android device is a no brainer. At that point, the only limiting factor for quality will be network speed and latency.

After the Broadwell series (iirc) of mircoarchitecture, Intel increased the encoding quality of their Quick Sync hardware.

There is a decent table that shows the various video formats that the various microarchitectures can decode and encode on the following wiki page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video