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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Intel Quicksync would do it, no need for a dedicated GPU.
You need a Intel GPU for that. It just so happens Intel CPUs come with GPUs these days.
Yes hence no need for a dedicated GPU
True, but to say CPU is not quite the correct term. It is still a GPU it just in on board graphics.
I didn’t say CPU? Quicksync is Intels dedicated hardware transcoder in the iGPU.
One of my miniPCs is just a little N95 and it can easily transcode 4K HDR to 1080p (HDR or tonemapped SDR) to a couple of clients, and with excellent image quality. You could build a nice little server with a modern i3 and 16gigs of ram and it would smash through 4 or 5 high bitrate 4K HDR transcodes just fine.
Is that one transcoding client local to you? or are you trying to stream over the web? if it’s local, put some of the budget to a new player for that screen perhaps?
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.
