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Comment by rmm | Hacker News Reader

I put an a360 Card into an old machine I turned into a plex server. It turned it into a transcoding powerhouse. I can do multiple indepdent streams now without it skipping a beat. Price-performance ratio was off the chart

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Intel has been a beast at transcoding for years, it’s a relatively niche application though.

My 7950X3Ds GPU does 4k HDR (33Mb/s) to 1080p at 40fps (proxmox, jellyfin). If these GPUs would support SR-IOV I would grab one for transcoding and GPU accelerated remote desktop.

Untouched video (star wars 8) 4k HDR (60Mb/s) to 1080p at 28fps

All first gen arc gpus share the same video encoder/decoder, including the sub-$100 A310, that can handle four (I haven't tested more than two) simultaneous 4k HDR -> 1080p AV1 transcodes at high bitrate with tone mapping while using 12-15W of power.

No SR-IOV.

Any idea how that compares to Apple Silicon for that job? I bought the $599 MacBook Air with M1 as my plex server for this reason. Transcodes 4k HEVC and doesn’t even need a fan. Sips watts.

All Intel arc even the $99 A310 has HW accel h265 and AV1 encoding.

Apple Silicon still don't support AV1 encoding but it is good enough for simple Jellyfin server i'm using one myself

Apple's hardware encode/decode for AV1 is quite literally, shit.

there is no AV1 encode on any Apple products right now

How's the Linux compatibility? I was tempted to do the same for my CentOS Stream Plex box.

Amazing. It is the first time I have plugged any gpu into my linux box and have it just work. I am never going back to anything else. My main computer uses an a750, and my jellyfin server uses an a310.

No issues with linux. The server did not like the a310, but that is because it is an old dell t430 and it is unsupported hardware. The only thing I had to do was to tweak the fan curve so that it stopped going full tilt.

>It is the first time I have plugged any gpu into my linux box and have it just work

I guess before you used Nvidia because out of the box support for AMD has existed for ages.

I havee had 2 cards. I had issue with both under linux.

Interesting application. Was this a machine lacking an iGPU, or does the Intel GPU-on-a-stick have more quicksync power than the iGPU?

A not inconsequential possibility is that both the iGPU and dGPU are sharing the transcoding workload, rather than the dGPU replacing the iGPU. It's a fairly forgotten feature of Intel Arc, but I don't blame anyone because the help articles are dusty to say the least.

Good to know. I'm still waiting for UNRaid 7.0 for proper Arc support to pull the trigger on one.

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