I’m taking down my big Supermicro server to save energy and moving Plex/Jellyfin/*arr to a spare 10th gen Intel NUC with SSDs. Performance is fine for DirectPlay media to my SHIELD and mobile devices, but the onboard GPU power is limited and struggles to even transcode some 1080p media – let alone 4K. Does anyone have experience using eGPUs in a Thunderbolt chassis with a NUC and can you share what worked or didn’t work for you in terms of hardware and configuration?
Edit: this is an i7-10710U with NVMe storage and 32GB of RAM, running Windows 10 with all the latest drivers directly from Intel.
Edit 2.0: (a year later, which nobody will ever read) I switched to Linux and all my issues disappeared. Really.
The onboard gpu is likely more powerful than all but some workstation gpus you could add for transcoding, it’s more likely you don’t have hardware acceleration working properly.
That’s good to know. Other than enabling hardware acceleration and setting the transcoding quality, what else can I try tweaking in Plex?
I think you can check logs, but iirc you need x11 running for it to all work.
Also install vainfo and see what it says.
Iirc arch has a page with information on vaapi which might include details on how you enable plex.
I edited the post to mention that this is Windows 10, but I’m not at all against installing Arch instead if it improves performance.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/
Take a look, at the bottom there’s a way of seeing if it’s used.
You should be golden, you should be able to handle it trivially, especially with your chipset.
Oh wtf, hmm, I don’t know, let me check online, never tried on windows.