NVlink / SLI for transcoding?

[Jellyfinit]

So I was looking at charts for transcoding benchmarks for plex servers (it's my understanding it get the same results as jellyfin for NVENC performance) and I noticed that it's not really the stronger the video card the better, instead it's the more vram the better. Because of this the rtx 3060 12gb cards can handle 10 h.264 or 10 HEVC streams when transcoding 4k to 1080p, according to this page here: https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding . I have a 1080 (non ti) and it can only handle 2 transcodes at 4k at the moment. (For those that don't know, with the latest drivers nvidia lifted the artificial limit on transcodes so hacked drivers are no longer required, that' s just the limit of the 1080.) Right now on amazon you can get a used RTX 3060 12GB card for $210 used here: https://www.amazon.com/GIGABYTE-REV2-0-W...28e6d374b3 . Making me wonder, because vram is king, is it possible to run two of these cards in SLI using NVlink to get 24gb of Vram to potentially have a 20 transcode limit? Does Jellyfin even support SLI? If it does you'll be hard pressed (I think) to get this kind of performance from any single video card for $420. If so I'll call it the 420 transcode king.(lol) If anyone has any experience with Jellyfin and SLI please give me your feed back on this.

[TheDreadPirate]

VRAM only matters for for tone mapping (converting HDR to SDR). If most of your content is 4K it is likely most of it is HDR and most transcodes would also involve tone mapping.

As for your question about SLI, I have no idea. I'm not aware of any documentation about it one way or the other.

Perhaps consider Intel Arc? The cards are cheaper while still being extremely capable for transcoding. The Intel Arc A380 in my system can do about 5-6 tone mapped HDR to SDR streams with its 6GB of RAM. Plain transcoding without tone mapping, it can do about 20. And only costs ~$120, often closer to $100.

[Jellyfinit]

Thank you for telling me about intel ark. I'll start researching it. This computer is also doing some gaming so that's the first thing that comes to mind for me when it comes to using Intel ark, it's my understanding it's pretty trash for gaming. But all it has to out preform is a 1080 at the moment as that's what's in there. It's a computer hooked up to my TV that runs torrents, runs jellyfin and does some gaming. Do you know if some arc cards can do more transcodes than other? It's a shame that there's no information on SLI. Before looking into video cards I was looking into dedicated encoder cards but it seems that it's non existent. Can I use my 1080 for gaming and general use and use the ark card only for transcoding?

[TheDreadPirate]

Intel Arc has gotten better. They've done a lot of work on their drivers. But they definitely are still lagging. I am pretty sure it is still quite a bit better than a 1080.

I'd opt to get a single Nvidia card in this dual use situation. A RTX 3060 for $210 is a pretty good price, considering the pricing of Nvidia's cards, in general.