I’m starting to get more and more HDR content, and I’m noticing an issue with my Jellyfin server. In nearly all cases, it’s required to transcode and tone map the HDR content. All of it is in 4k.

My little Quadro P400 just can’t keep up. Encoder and decoder usage hovers around 15-17%, but the GPU core usage is pinned at 100% the entire time, and my framerate doesn’t exceed 19fps, which makes the video skip so badly it’s unwatchable.

What’s a reasonable upgrade? I’m thinking about the P4000, but that might be excessive. Also, it needs to fit in a low-profile slot.

Edit: I’m shocked at how much good feedback I received on this post. Hopefully someone else will stumble on it in the future and be able to learn something. Ultimately, I decided to purchase a used RTX A2000 for just about $250. It’s massively overkill for transcoding/tone mapping 4k, but once I’m brave enough to risk breaking my Proxmox install and setting up vGPU, I’m hoping to take advantage of the Tensor cores for AI object detection in my Blue Iris VM. Also, the A2000 supports AV1, and while I don’t need that at the moment, it will be nice to have in the future, I think.

Final Edit: I replaced the Quadro P400 with an RTX A2000 today. With the P400, transcoding 4k HEVC HDR to 4k HEVC (or h264) SDR with tone mapping resulted in transcode rate of about 19fps with 100% GPU usage. With the A2000, I’m getting a transcode rate of about 120fps with around 30% GPU usage; plenty of room for growth if I add 1 or 2 users to the server. For $250, it was well worth the upgrade.

  • NineEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    4K and on my P2000 or using Intel QSV isn’t a great experience. I can totally see it not being a good experience on a P4000 too.

    That being said with HDR work 1080 it works with both QSV and the P2000. So it should work like a champ on the P4000. I don’t really have any HDR displays so I don’t really grab that many things in HDR so YMMV.

    The best advice I can offer is if the content is transcoded into a mp4 container with the ATOM upfront ( aka fast start / web) and you’re not using subtitles it will work okay-ish as long as you do not pause it. Using the mkv container is just asking for sadness in my experience with it. Though at this point if I need to do that I just transcode into AV1, burn the subs into it, and pass through the audio.