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1U Chassis GPU - without additional power requirements

smokey7722

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smokey7722

smokey7722 15

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I was looking at add a GPU to my setup again (considered in the past but didn't follow through) and was looking at the newest matrix from Nvidia (https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new).  There is a datacenter tab now which seems helpful for my purposes and figured I would check to see if anyone has used the A2 yet?

 

The current system can easily play or transcode 720p h265 content but 1080p or 4k is just too much.  I don't have as much control over client devices for my family as they are hard headed.  My local playback is fine as I am using Shield's.

 

Chassis: Supermicro SC113MFAC2-R606CB

Motherboard: Supermicro X10SDV-7TP8F (RSC-RR1U-E8 riser)

 

The physical system runs ESX with a Windows VM running Emby so I would be passing the card through to the Windows VM to provide Emby the access (though I may consider playing with the vGPU options instead so that a second VM I have could share the GPU if needed).  Ideally I would like to avoid needing additional power for the card and since its 1U it would need to be a single slot and ideally low profile (due to tight space).  The A2 seems to be a good option for this from what it looks like.  I figured before I picked one up I would see if anyone had any thoughts or recommendations instead?  And also was to confirm if these newer Ampere (vs Turing or Pascal) based cards are supported by Emby?

Edited by smokey7722
Luke Emby Team

Luke 42077

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Hi, did you end up going with this?

smokey7722

smokey7722 15

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7 hours ago, Luke said:

Hi, did you end up going with this?

Not yet, I was waiting to see if there was any feedback or concerns with using the newer generation card and its support.  I'm working on prepping the systems to be able to accept the card (I have to reconfigure things to remove a raid controller to free up the space to put the card in) in the meantime.

 

@Luke Do you know of any reason why this newer A2 card could be a problem?  I haven't used a GPU with Emby yet so wasn't sure if there was differences in the Nvidia chipsets and different drivers or support.

Edited by smokey7722
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RanmaCanada

RanmaCanada 494

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You absolutely do have control over what your family uses as it's your server.  Tell them to get with the program if they want access. Now, the A2 is barely more powerful than a 1050Ti, and it's literally 10x the price ($1100-$1900).  I'll be blunt.  It would be pretty silly to spend that amount of money on this card.  You would be better off to upgrade your entire setup, or just buy a 1050Ti low profile.   As for cards being supported, they all are supported because of NVENC.  Heck you could also do what I did and just buy a broken laptop with an intel chipset and use that as your Emby server.  Very little power usage, and full quicksync capabilities.  You would want at least an 8th gen system, but the more recent the better as the ASICS heavily improve each gen.  My 8th gen i3-8130u could handle 3 4k transcodes with tone mapping before throwing up, and my new i3-11th gen dual core can easily handle twice as many, all while using 15-20 watts.

Edited by RanmaCanada
smokey7722

smokey7722 15

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1 hour ago, RanmaCanada said:

You absolutely do have control over what your family uses as it's your server.  Tell them to get with the program if they want access. Now, the A2 is barely more powerful than a 1050Ti, and it's literally 10x the price ($1100-$1900).  I'll be blunt.  It would be pretty silly to spend that amount of money on this card.  You would be better off to upgrade your entire setup, or just buy a 1050Ti low profile.   As for cards being supported, they all are supported because of NVENC.  Heck you could also do what I did and just buy a broken laptop with an intel chipset and use that as your Emby server.  Very little power usage, and full quicksync capabilities.  You would want at least an 8th gen system, but the more recent the better as the ASICS heavily improve each gen.  My 8th gen i3-8130u could handle 3 4k transcodes with tone mapping before throwing up, and my new i3-11th gen dual core can easily handle twice as many, all while using 15-20 watts.

Well given I have over 10 family members who are die hard Apple, Samsung TV, LG TV, Amazon device, roku, etc fans and they are using devices that I have no control over and I have given up on the battle with them to replace many of these with better devices.  Sometimes you do NOT have control over family and it isn't worth my time fighting them on it.  It's not worth it, the bottom line is there are a variety of crappy devices that require transcoding.  Right now my system can easily handle 720p h265 or 1080p h264 for them but I have been trying to upgrade my libraries and stop storing 720p.

I also run a lot of other systems out of my house as I work in IT.  This chassis is running ESX, so no, I can't easily upgrade that either.  It's cost prohibitive to do so at this time and I don't physically have more space to add a second or a dedicated machine for Emby.  Thus I am looking at options to help ease the load and increase performance on the existing system by adding a dedicated GPU that can work in this chassis.  A small low profile GPU (with no aux power requirement) would do it, and that is the reason I posted here was to see what peoples thoughts were.  Ignoring the higher cost, as that's always the case when working with 1U chassis', I saw the A2 and figured it was worth asking for opinions.  Ideally I just need to be able to handle 2-3, maybe 4 simultaneous transcodes (720, 1080 or 4K) and that should be more than adequate.  Right now I also keep both a 1080p h264 and a 4K h265 copy of movies which is a waste of storage (though I am not in need of additional storage right now) - if I can drop those 1080p versions, that would be even better as it would prolong storage upgrade requirements.

I've seen A2's on ebay new for $850 so the price isn't that bad and I am not in a huge rush either so I can wait for a good deal.  If there is a higher performing card that can serve my needs, I would be more than happy to entertain that.  My distributors don't have anything down in that price range but I am perfectly happy buying one via ebay as long as it works. 

RanmaCanada

RanmaCanada 494

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The 1050Ti can easily handle your work load as it can do up to 3 4k to 1080/720p transcodes or 13 regular transcodes.  And yes you do have control over things as it's your server.  Tell your family to pound sand.  You have control over everything.  I'm sure you just don't want to start stuff with your family, but they need to understand it's your way or the highway, as you can easily just cut them off.  I was in the same boat as you and I told them to either buy new hardware or they would be cut off.  They all bought new hardware.  It's why I haven't been active in the Apple section on here as I told my family members with crApple products I won't be supporting them anymore and they can either buy firesticks to continue watching, or I'll just delete their accounts.  They spent the $25 to buy firesticks when they were on sale and everyone is "happy".  

In the end they need to understand you're in control, not them, whether they like it or not.

https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding

babgvant

babgvant 143

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18 minutes ago, RanmaCanada said:

The 1050Ti can easily handle your work load as it can do up to 3 4k to 1080/720p transcodes or 13 regular transcodes.  And yes you do have control over things as it's your server.  Tell your family to pound sand.  You have control over everything.  I'm sure you just don't want to start stuff with your family, but they need to understand it's your way or the highway, as you can easily just cut them off.  I was in the same boat as you and I told them to either buy new hardware or they would be cut off.  They all bought new hardware.  It's why I haven't been active in the Apple section on here as I told my family members with crApple products I won't be supporting them anymore and they can either buy firesticks to continue watching, or I'll just delete their accounts.  They spent the $25 to buy firesticks when they were on sale and everyone is "happy".  

In the end they need to understand you're in control, not them, whether they like it or not.

https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding

Suggesting the OP tell his family to "pound sand" seems very off topic; this isn't Reddit, and they weren't asking for relationship advice. That said, it sounds like you have a very healthy relationship with your family. It's great that you are able to communicate with them so empathetically and effectively.

Back to the topic at hand. This is probably a question better targeted at the devs for whatever transcoding engine Emby is using. IIRC, it was ffmpeg back when I was involved with the project, which supports anything Kepler+, so you should be fine there. The A2 has full HWA support, and the NEVC API pivots around capability not model numbers, so I expect that you would be totally fine there as well. Unfortunately, given the price of entry I suspect that it will be very difficult to find someone who's tried this and can offer solid advice. If you get a used card, I'd expect that you could sell it for close to what you paid, so it's relatively low risk. Let us know how it works out, got me curious.

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  • 1 month later...
smokey7722

smokey7722 15

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5 minutes ago, RanmaCanada said:

Well, if you happen to have a machine shop or are "handy"..  https://smallformfactor.net/forum/threads/rtx-a2000-full-copper-low-profile-single-slot-edition-aka-a2000-spongebob-copperpants-mod.17372/ haha

Or wait and see what AMD does to replace the 6400 as it does not have video encode/decode?  Sorry, just trying to move forward and be more helpful.

I'm likely picking up an A2 at this point as I don't have access to a machine shop or the tools to modify a card.  The A2 looks like it should do the job and I honestly don't care about the price.

smokey7722

smokey7722 15

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A bit of a slow process but I did order an A2 and hope to play with things soon.  I'll update this thread as I get it in hand and start testing.

  • 2 weeks later...
smokey7722

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I did get the A2 in hand and for reference for anyone who may try to use one, you need to have the Above 4G Decoding bios setting enabled.  It seems hit or miss with server or consumer motherboards nowadays if its enabled by default but you will need it enabled or the system won't post at all with the card installed.  Took me a few hours banging my head against the wall with that one and ultimately only found it by the Bios snooping function in the Supermicro IPMI interface to find the post failure code (95), then translating it to Insufficient PCI Resources and there was a Supermicro FAQ that mentioned enabling this setting (https://www.supermicro.com/support/faqs/faq.cfm?faq=15556).  The FAQ wasn't specific to my servers motherboard but I figured its likely the same issue and turns out I was right.

Hopefully that may help someone in the future but if not, at least I am updating the thread as promised!  I have a bit to do before I can start testing things so it won't be that quick but at least I can boot the system with the card installed now.

Edited by smokey7722
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smokey7722

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Rather than leaving this open ended I figured I should provide an update...  This took way longer than I planned to get to but I finally got to it.  The 1U chassis now has an A2 installed in it and I have the vCenter Nvidia vGPU license in place for vWS.  I assigned the VM for Emby an A2-16Q profile which gives the VM effectively the entire A2 card to use. 

 

From the logs after driver install and reboot, Emby shows the following decoders: 

2024-01-03 16:00:37.997 Info CodecManager: CodecList:
    Decoders
       mpeg2video
             CUVID NVIDIA A2-16Q - MPEG-2
             DX11VA NVIDIA A2-16Q [1] - MPEG-2
             NVDEC NVIDIA A2-16Q - MPEG-2
       vc1
             DX11VA NVIDIA A2-16Q [1] - VC-1
             NVDEC NVIDIA A2-16Q - VC-1
       h264
             CUVID NVIDIA A2-16Q - H.264 (AVC)
             DX11VA NVIDIA A2-16Q [1] - H.264 (AVC)
             NVDEC NVIDIA A2-16Q - H.264 (AVC)
       hevc
             CUVID NVIDIA A2-16Q - H.265 (HEVC)
             DX11VA NVIDIA A2-16Q [1] - H.265 (HEVC)
             NVDEC NVIDIA A2-16Q - H.265 (HEVC)
       vp9
             NVDEC NVIDIA A2-16Q - VP9
             DX11VA NVIDIA A2-16Q [1] - VP9
       vp8
             NVDEC NVIDIA A2-16Q - VP8
    Encoders
       h264
             NVENC NVIDIA A2-16Q - H.264 (AVC)
       hevc
             NVENC NVIDIA A2-16Q - H.265 (HEVC)

 

Real world testing...

 

Prior to the card I could run anything in the house using my Nvidia Shield Pro clients as expected as nothing has to transcode.  My phone or web browsers required some transcoding but seemed fine.  However my family who uses my Emby instance as I mentioned earlier have a variety of clients from native TV's (Samsung, LG, etc) to Apple TV's or various phones.  If I had a piece of content that was 4K HEVC HDR10, it needed to transcode it down for them and the system could keep up in general for one 4K HEVC transcode.  The VM has 8GB of ram and 8 cpu cores and was constantly rising to 80%+ during transcodes unless I kept 1080p H264 content for remote users to select when they had to transcode.  More cores didn't seem to help either and I also can't keep throwing more at it for CPU as the ESX host runs other VM's too.

After the card... So far I haven't seen it break.  I've had 4x 4K HEVC HDR10 streams transcoding down to 720p or 1080p plus a few H264 transcodes going at once and the CPU hasn't gone above 10%  Ironically thats also with the A2 not reaching above ~30% utilization either.  Example below... this had 2x 4K HEVC HDR10's and 2x 1080p H264 transcoding at once.  Yea, 18%.  I'm planning on dropping the VM CPU down to 4 from 8 as it hasn't needed much at all so far.

image.thumb.png.94e2e0979939085d5c5864a8e293d0bf.png

smokey7722

smokey7722 15

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On 1/2/2023 at 9:03 AM, Luke said:

Hi, did you end up going with this?

Took a year but its up and running and I provided a recap post.

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