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NVENC or QuickSync?


Mkilbride

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Mkilbride

I use my gaming PC as my Emby Server. I don't have a NAS or anything. Maybe in the future. My specs are pretty beefy. A 8700K @5GHZ, 1080 Ti, 32GB 3000MHZ RAM, and around 22TB of Media storage space. (+SSDs for gaming, OS and programs)

 

I don't have Premiere yet, but am considering it for HW Acceleration. A lot of my content doesn't require it - when streaming locally, or I have Hi10 content which Emby and Plex don't support. (Kodi seems to pass it through just fine though...but no matter what skin or plugin I use, I find Kodi slugish and hard to use on my NVIDIA Shield, examining the HW Info, almost all of my Shield's 3GB of RAM is being used by Kodi. Like 2700MB/2999MB or something.  With just Emby or Plex it usually hovers around 1.7-2GB.

 

Without HW Acceleration, when I watch my CPU usage spike up to 90%+ for a minute, it would definitely make gaming unplayable. That's with throttling. Without it'd be even worse...

 

I installed Jellyfin to give it a test, but Jellyfin is just...not usable to me, bad UI, for some reason it won't bitstream DTS or TrueHD, even with the option for it to selected.  Already a deal breaker there.  With HW Acceleration, I saw my GPU usage spike to around 15-20% usage. Which would be a pretty good hit  while playing a game actually. I was surprised, as Pascal and above NVIDIA GPU's had dedicated chips on them for such tasks and usually it's a 1-2% hit - at least on PC programs.  I couldn't test QuickSync at the moment because I have my iGPU disabled via Bios(For a more stable OC, but realistically it barely helps, maybe drops like 1c).  I was googling abit and saw some conflicting information that if you use a dedicated GPU, that you can't use QuickSync (While the Dedicated GPU is in use, if it's idle you'd be fine). Is that true? Because I just thought it'd be an ideal use for my iGPU which isn't used and wouldn't affect my gaming. Thoughts?

 

Are there any downsides to using QuickSync VS my 1080 Ti? I know the 1080 Ti is leagues ahead in terms of horsepower, but QuickSync is pretty good. We're talking like 2 active streams, tops.

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rbjtech

From what I've read, QuickSync will outperform NVENC/DEC for encoding/decoding tasks.  The fact that you have the iGPU sitting there (and it's the 630 version) you have zero to lose by turning it on and using it to offload any transcoding.

 

I'm unsure on the dual use - ie gaming using the Ti and transcoding in the background using the QuickSync - as long as NV is turned off in emby, then I don't see why you could not use both - an interesting question.

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sfatula

I also use a gaming PC for Emby and gaming, and my desktop as well. NVENC crushes any Intel on my machine as I have a cheapie Intel on chip only, vs an Nvidia RTX2060. It is definitely possible to use Intel for Emby, and, NVidia for gaming. Quicksync may be faster for roughly equivalent graphics cards. 

 

I don't recall ever seeing my 8700k spike up to 90% without transcoding (machine as a whole not 1 CPU). Check out my screen capture, you can set which GPU you use for what, and even disable one if you wish. 

 

Using my Nvidia, I can deinterlace via ffmpeg a 1080i recording at 16x using nvenc/nvdec. So, an hour recording takes about 3 minutes using yadif. I can't come close using Intel. However, using Intel means my nvidia is free for gaming.

 

On the other hand, I don't have many games that utilize the nvdia to it's max. Transcoding a single video is maybe 7% nvidia use. 

 

But you have many options in your scenario. Definitely you can use Intel for Emby and your 1080 for gaming. At least on Linux, not sure what OS you are. 

post-348227-0-06456500-1589480236_thumb.png

Edited by sfatula
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rbjtech

I also use a gaming PC for Emby and gaming, and my desktop as well. NVENC crushes any Intel on my machine as I have a cheapie Intel on chip only, vs an Nvidia RTX2060. It is definitely possible to use Intel for Emby, and, NVidia for gaming. Quicksync may be faster for roughly equivalent graphics cards. 

 

I don't recall ever seeing my 8700k spike up to 90% without transcoding (machine as a whole not 1 CPU). Check out my screen capture, you can set which GPU you use for what, and even disable one if you wish. 

 

Using my Nvidia, I can deinterlace via ffmpeg a 1080i recording at 16x using nvenc/nvdec. So, an hour recording takes about 3 minutes using yadif. I can't come close using Intel. However, using Intel means my nvidia is free for gaming.

 

On the other hand, I don't have many games that utilize the nvdia to it's max. Transcoding a single video is maybe 7% nvidia use. 

 

But you have many options in your scenario. Definitely you can use Intel for Emby and your 1080 for gaming. At least on Linux, not sure what OS you are. 

 

You have a Turing NEVC encoder, that is significantly improved over the Pascal '10 series' card that the OP has.  In their scenerio, QuickSync is faster for the same quality - there are many 'comparisons' on youtube going into this.

 

Good news about running both however, seems to me to be the best solution - run the 1080Ti for gaming and the quicksync for transcoding.  :D

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sfatula

You have a Turing NEVC encoder, that is significantly improved over the Pascal '10 series' card that the OP has.  In their scenerio, QuickSync is faster for the same quality - there are many 'comparisons' on youtube going into this.

 

Good news about running both however, seems to me to be the best solution - run the 1080Ti for gaming and the quicksync for transcoding.  :D

 

Of course, which is what I said (or tried to), there are a lot of benchmarks out there for semi equivalent comparisons. In my case, there is zero comparison but it's not a fair fight either as you say. But yes, the main point was it's not an issue to use both. I was sort of surprised it was so, but, loved that it was! 

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Jdiesel

I would use the Intel iGPU because you 1) You have it and it isn't being used 2) It frees up your dedicated GPU for gaming and other tasks that would benefit more from it.

 

Until you start to need more than 15+ simultaneous transcodes there is no benefit to the Nvidia card over the Intel iGPU. One can nitpick over image quality between the 2 but I am confident that @@softworkz is tuning each GPU for the best balance of performance and quality. We may even see a more granular control of quality/performance for hwa acceleration at some point. The only think that might give Nvidia the edge over Intel is now the colorspace conversions are taking place but that is beyond my level of expertise and I am only speculating. 

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Mkilbride

Ok, so I was setting up QuickSync and ran into this:

 

uZqDdKu.png

 

QuickSync apparently can't be used for H.265 HEVC? I mean...that's kind of what a large portion of my content is...like almost all my movies, a good portion of my anime as well. Does it just mean while transcoding files for like streaming versions and whatnot? OR does it mean when it has to transcode something to say a browser?

 

Performance wise, I just tested it with a 1080p HEVC video. It showcased around 15% CPU usage for about 45 seconds, then went to like 0.6% or less usage. iGPU's usage was around 75-80% for those 45 seconds, then went down to about 10%.

Edited by Mkilbride
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Does it just mean while transcoding files for like streaming versions and whatnot? OR does it mean when it has to transcode something to say a browser?

 

It has no impact on whether transcoding occurs or not. It only impacts how the transcoding happens, if that's what ends up happening.

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Jdiesel

I don't know if it is a Windows (Quicksync) versus Linux (VAAPI) issue but my UHD630 shows up as an available h265 encoder

 

5ebeb63648234_Capture.png

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SHSPVR

I don't know if it is a Windows (Quicksync) versus Linux (VAAPI) issue but my UHD630 shows up as an available h265 encoder

 

5ebeb63648234_Capture.png

 

Maybe a it Windows thing

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Mkilbride

Just out of interest, I decided to use my 1080 Ti for it today. It was definitely faster. Around 3.5x faster(based on FPS), but yeah, it ate up like 35% of my GPU. Same CPU usage as QuickSync.  SO I don't know about my 630 UHD /w QuickSync being "just as fast" as some people in this thread said.

 

This was done by testing how long it took to fully transcode a file. With my NVIDIA GPU, it took about 2 minutes 10 seconds, for a 20 minute episode of a TV Show. For QuickSync, it took roughly 5 minutes.

of course, if I go the Software route...my CPU usage shoots up to like 80%, but I get 1200+ FPS and the thing transcodes the entire file in like 10 seconds. But I guess there's really no substitute for a good CPU, even with these dedicated HW encoders.

 

I'll probably stick with QuickSync regardless though. At least in my usage, it's been fine. Most of my content can be direct played anyways...and for what can't,  5~ish minutes isn't so bad for a 20 minute episode, considering I'm not getting any stuttering / stopping and ALWAYS have a buffer of a few minutes available, it's nothing to complain about.

Edited by Mkilbride
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Jdiesel

Is throttling enabled? I would be more concerned with power usage than speed for transcoding. Does it matter if a 2 hour movie takes 5 minutes to transcode instead of 3 minutes? As long as it is faster than realtime you shouldn't notice much of a difference. If you watch to batch convert a bunch of videos then the faster method definitely makes sense.

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sfatula

I'll probably stick with QuickSync regardless though. At least in my usage, it's been fine. Most of my content can be direct played anyways...and for what can't,  5~ish minutes isn't so bad for a 20 minute episode, considering I'm not getting any stuttering / stopping and ALWAYS have a buffer of a few minutes available, it's nothing to complain about.

 

Yeah, and since you have a multipurpose machine (gaming), you're much better off overall using Quicksync for the same reasons I do. As long as it keeps up, that keeps your CPU and NVidia GPU available for gaming. 

 

I actually run dozens of things on my server, it's a desktop, MySQL server, video editor, gaming, run 2 virtual machines, etc. All works fine. Emby is very low usage. But the GPU is an integral part of that. 

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Mkilbride

Is throttling enabled? I would be more concerned with power usage than speed for transcoding. Does it matter if a 2 hour movie takes 5 minutes to transcode instead of 3 minutes? As long as it is faster than realtime you shouldn't notice much of a difference. If you watch to batch convert a bunch of videos then the faster method definitely makes sense.

I disabled it for testing purposes. Also it wasn't a 2 hour movie, but a 20 minute episode, but yeah.

 

I just wish there was a setting in converting videos to use my NVIDIA GPU instead or CPU even, because yeah, it's much faster than QuickSync, and if I'm converting something, usually not doing anything else.

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