Is Emby able to do transcoding with multiple GPU's?

[bulineta1 0]

Hello Community,

 

I want to plug in 2 Asus ROG STRIX Geforce GTX 1070 - 8GB in SLI to be able to do more transcoding processes at the same time. 

 

From what I heard from an Nvidia moderator on forums the situation is looking like this:

 

 

 

Assuming you are on Windows platform, two GeForce's in SLI configuration will not double NVENC performance automatically, because Windows will treat them as a single D3D adapter.

If you keep the GPUs separate (without SLI), Windows treats them as two D3D adapters and then the application can distribute encoding sessions between the two GPUs by selecting the appropriate CUDA device or D3D adapter ordinal (depending upon whether the application uses CUDA or D3D for NVENC interaction). In such case, your aggregate encoding performance will double, because you can direct your encoding jobs to NVENC on each GPU independently.

 

 And from what I heard from reddit the situation is looking like this 

 

With the upcoming Emby Server 3.6, you should be able to accomplish what you are looking to do. You can already try the beta (which has been pretty stable so far) and start testing hardware transcoding.

 

Basically, the new version allows you to choose what encoders and decoders to use, and give them a priority. It’ll essentially start out using your hardware, and if for some reason it needs to fallback, it’ll automatically use the next available decoder/encoder.

 

Do note that you need Emby Premiere in order to take advantage of hardware transcoding.

 

 

 

Now the questions are:

 

Is Emby able to do transcoding with multiple GPU's?

The GPU's needs to be SLI or normal non SLI?

Does Windows see 2 GPUs non sli?

Should I configure something in order to make this possible? 

 

Thank you!

 

 

[bulineta1 0]

Update* 

 

I installed the GPU's in Sli and not SLI, emby see both of them but is not doing the transcoding thru GPUs. Now is using all the cpu 

 

Anybody know what the problem is? should I install something on windows? 

[Luke 42080]

Hi, we don't have load balancing with multiple GPU's at this stage but it will be coming in future updates.

[chacawaca 109]

do you have premier key ?

[bulineta1 0]

I got it, after I installed the cuda multiple treading fix was overwritten. So the short answer is no? we can not use multiple gpus? @@Luke

[Luke 42080]

You can have multiple GPU's in your system but Emby will not yet load balance between them.

[ebr 16185]

Hi.  With them separate, Emby will not utilize the second one so it sounds like your best bet (right now) would be to configure them with SLI.

 

Let us know if this answers your question.

 

Thanks.

[chacawaca 109]

@@bulineta1 you may be interrested by this https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch/tree/master/win

[bulineta1 0]

I did the patch and is working great.

@@bulineta1 you may be interrested by this https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch/tree/master/win

 

I have them in SLI but is not much of a difference I think. I will stick with 1080p and force direct play... is better this way for 30+ members of my familly. 

Hi.  With them separate, Emby will not utilize the second one so it sounds like your best bet (right now) would be to configure them with SLI.

 

Let us know if this answers your question.

 

Thanks.

[Omphalos 3]

Sorry to dig up an old thread, but this is the only one I could find on the subject. In a system with 2 GPU's which are NOT in SLI, the 2nd one (non-display) being used exclusively for transcoding, is there a way to assign Emby to use that card specifically? 

[Happy2Play 9781]

2 minutes ago, Omphalos said:

Sorry to dig up an old thread, but this is the only one I could find on the subject. In a system with 2 GPU's which are NOT in SLI, the 2nd one (non-display) being used exclusively for transcoding, is there a way to assign Emby to use that card specifically? 

Good question, do both card show on the Transcoding page?  Dashboard-Transcoding (Enable hardware acceleration when available: Advanced)

[Carlo 4561]

5 hours ago, Omphalos said:

Sorry to dig up an old thread, but this is the only one I could find on the subject. In a system with 2 GPU's which are NOT in SLI, the 2nd one (non-display) being used exclusively for transcoding, is there a way to assign Emby to use that card specifically? 

Hi, do you already have the 2 GPUs?

Which GPUs do you have?

[Omphalos 3]

Ye s I do already them them - one is an RTX-2070 and the other is a GTX-1660. I want to use my powerful gaming PC, which sits idle 80% of the time, to run my Emby server as well. But I don't want it to use my gaming GPU (2070), because I want that to be available when needed, so I want to add the GTX-1660 for Emby transcoding duties. I already have that card running transcoding in my existing server and it does great, I'm just trying to combine both systems into one. 

And yes, I have plenty of CPU power (20 cores, 40 threads) and RAM (128GB) to do transcoding as well as game at the same time. And Emby would use totally drives, and I can assign Emby to only use certain CPU cores as well. 

Edited January 15, 2021 by Omphalos

[Omphalos 3]

22 hours ago, Happy2Play said:

Good question, do both card show on the Transcoding page?  Dashboard-Transcoding (Enable hardware acceleration when available: Advanced)

I don't have the system running 2 cards yet, I was wondering it what I proposed was possible before I went through the trouble of setting it up. 

[Carlo 4561]

OK so nothing to purchase for testing.

If you setup the 1660 as the 1st GPU then this should be what Emby uses.  Then you should be able to have the 2070 as the 2nd GPU and use it for gaming.

I believe that should work but might need a bit of tinkering/setup.

[Happy2Play 9781]

Yes hardwaredetect should identify all usable hardware then you would need to select the card you with to use for HWA on screen mentioned above.

[Carlo 4561]

I've not tried this recently.  I know a while back it would only use the 1st GPU but think now it give you a choice. I've got a couple GPU here but no open slots in the PC.

If you set this up can you take a couple of screen shots for us so we can see what decoders and encoders it shows?  Would be nice to see this!