Hardware upgrade dilemma

[TheDreadPirate]

With an Arc graphics card, are any operations still CPU bound, like burning subtitles? Or are all of those GPU bound? For cost reasons, if I can get away with buying a 12th gen I3, that would save some money.

Burning in subtitles does partially involve the CPU and does slow down transcoding.  But getting a faster CPU, or CPU with more cores, won't speed up that process much/at all.  In my testing when subtitle burn-in is occuring, my CPU usage is about 20-30% spread across all 8 threads on my 12100.  BUT, that is 20-30% at 800Mhz.  The subtitle burn-in work load just doesn't trigger the CPU to boost.

Also, its the difference between transcoding at 1000FPS and 500-750FPS.  Still much much faster than required.

Audio transcoding also occurs on the CPU, which is purely single threaded.  My 12100 does not boost much for audio transcodes, indicating it is keeping up with the Arc GPU's video transcode.

Overall, I've yet to encounter a situation where my 12100 is bottlenecking my A380.

Also, is it okay to buy an 'F' processor variant, one without the iGPU? It doesn't seem like Intel's Deep Link Hyperencode is destined for the Linux/docker version of jellyfin-ffmpeg anytime soon, and I think QuickSync still works, even without an iGPU, if you have an Arc GPU.

Yes.  I had to turn off my iGPU, actually.  My main Jellyfin instance runs directly in Ubuntu.  The problem is that Intel Quick Sync does not allow you select which GPU it uses.  It will use the first available GPU, which is almost always the iGPU and not the Arc GPU.  If I was using docker (which I do for my test instances) I could specify a GPU to pass into the container.

So going with an F SKU CPU is fine.

Finally, I think an A380 would be capable of burning subtitles into a 4k DV/HDR stream, transcode a 4K DV/HDR movie to 1080p SDR, and transcode 1080p/x265 to 1080p/x264 -- 3 total simulatenous streams. If I'm wrong about that, please let me know.

Thanks for your help!

One thing to keep in mind is that Jellyfin currently cannot do HDR to HDR transcoding.  If the video needs to be transcoded for ANY reason, including burning in subtitles, it will tone map the HDR video to SDR.  Work is being done to add HDR to HDR transcoding, but there is no ETA on that.

With that out of the way, yes, it should be able to handle 3 streams, easily.

It should be able to handle at least 6, possibly more, 4K HDR to 4K/1080P SDR tone mapped transcodes. And I stopped my testing when I hit 20 simultaneous 1080P AV1/HEVC SDR to 1080P H264 transcodes.  I only have 4 users so that was more than enough.