Worth enabling hardware acceleration with Radeon HD 5450? (2010)

[King Mustard]

I am running my Jellyfin media server on a PC with running Windows 11. Hardward-wise, an AMD Ryzen 5600X, 32 GB RAM and a Radeon HD 5450 GPU (released in 2010).

As it is a server, I only bought the GPU for basic display purposes, as the CPU does not have built-in display support.

My server certainly mostly 5-20 GB 10-bit H.265 video files.

The video files are generally accessed by Android smartphones casting them to TVs with built-in Chromecasts (or DLNA).

Currently, I do not have hardware acceleration enabled. Would I gain anything by enabling it?

[Host-in-the-Shell]

From the page you linked it mentions that it suports Unified Video Decoder 2.3, and for the 2 series I was able to find it supports full bitstream decoding of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, VC-1, as well as iDCT level acceleration of MPEG2 video streams. If your collection is H.265, then no. But if you are able to convert it to H.264 under an mp4 container then it can be utilized for video decoding then. If you require more advanced transcoding capabilities you can always add something in the intel arc series that is relatively cheap, and has great video codec support, including AV1 for future proofing.

That said, as long as all your clients can direct play your media, then you shouldn't have any problems at all so long as you're bypassing transcoding entirely. I believe that for Jellyfin 10.10 software transcoding will be introduced, but I still wouldn't recommend cooking your cpu with that.

[TheDreadPirate]

Even if it had useful codec support, driver support for that GPU has been deprecated for a while. Nor would the performance and quality be better than software transcoding.