Gaming and Plex?

jellyrole

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May 11, 2008
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I'm about to upgrade my computer and I'm trying to figure out the best way to go.

I currently have 2 machines, one for Plex and one for gaming. I usually have 2-4 Plex streams going at the same time and I'm currently running an i7 2600. Would I notice a dip in gaming if I assigned specific cores to Plex and saved 4-6 cores just for games?

I'm thinking about getting a 3900x.
 
3900x and Plex server here. It depends on the type stream. If you're doing full transcoding then that could impact your gaming depending on your IQ settings. When someone is transcoding Plex, I can sometimes notice it but I have Plex set to "fast" which is around the middle w/ regards to how much cpu to throw at it. However 98% of my streams are native IQ, and that has a small impact.

That said I would leave it up to the scheduler to prioritize cores and threads. Otherwise you'll only be using half yer cpu at anytime since Plex runs persistently. In my use case, there will be a Plex client watching something, while I'm doing some light gaming whilst have a session of encoding running. That's my use case and so far it's not been an issue.
 
5760x1080@144hz, triple screens w/ TXP.

I'd add that I've been in the process of re-encoding everything to HEVC (save space vs moar drives) and have updated the tv boxes to HEVC accelerated units like the newer Roku and a Shield TV box. Thus the impact is tiny now since everything plays natively.
 
Just use the optimize function in Plex ahead of time. That way no transcoding is done real time.
 
I have about 16tb of media currenly, is there an easy way for it to start working on the optimization?
 
I have about 16tb of media currenly, is there an easy way for it to start working on the optimization?

Change it to Make my processor hurt mode

Just tell it what you want each movie to optimize for and it will run the tasks in the background.
 
Change it to Make my processor hurt mode

Just tell it what you want each movie to optimize for and it will run the tasks in the background.

That could take 10 years man. There isn't an easy way to optimize all your media and transcoding kinda sucks anyways because its done via x264. I try to avoid that shit since I'm running x265 codec. There's only one craptastic pc in the house that cannot handle x265 natively. One of these days ima toss that crap gpu and replace it with a current gen cheapo.
 
That could take 10 years man. There isn't an easy way to optimize all your media and transcoding kinda sucks anyways because its done via x264. I try to avoid that shit since I'm running x265 codec. There's only one craptastic pc in the house that cannot handle x265 natively. One of these days ima toss that crap gpu and replace it with a current gen cheapo.

Oh ok, well guess you need to get moar cores. I run a quad core e5-1650 sandy bridge xeon and it transcode without a hitch on the fly to at least 3 roku's. But that's 1080p not 4k.
 
Oh ok, well guess you need to get moar cores. I run a quad core e5-1650 sandy bridge xeon and it transcode without a hitch on the fly to at least 3 roku's. But that's 1080p not 4k.

lol, yer probably NOT transcoding. If the client supports the codec and resolution, Plex will just pass the video along.
 
lol, yer probably NOT transcoding. If the client supports the codec and resolution, Plex will just pass the video along.

All my videoes are h265. I know my rokus support it but my old Panasonic Plasma does not. It does transcode that on the fly and does it with ease because its only 1080p.
 
All my videoes are h265. I know my rokus support it but my old Panasonic Plasma does not. It does transcode that on the fly and does it with ease because its only 1080p.

So from at least three to maybe one, which I don't think its transcoding either. It's just resized. The plasma is using the roku yea?
 
I'd be concerned about disk I/O and how the OS is handling it. If all of your storage is SSD and you've separated your Plex drives then probably no issue.
 
So from at least three to maybe one, which I don't think its transcoding either. It's just resized. The plasma is using the roku yea?

If the player does not support the codec, it is transcoding. If we are talking 1080p a 3900x should have zero issues with transcoding in the background while playing a game. I would however do as the above post suggest and have your Plex media on a dedicated drive to avoid potential hitches from disk IO activity.

4K i'm not sure about. All my hosted movies are 1080p and these days I just rent/buy from Amazon Prime Video if I really want to watch something that isn't on Netflix/Hulu/OnDemand via Directv
 
If the player does not support the codec, it is transcoding. If we are talking 1080p a 3900x should have zero issues with transcoding in the background while playing a game. I would however do as the above post suggest and have your Plex media on a dedicated drive to avoid potential hitches from disk IO activity.

4K i'm not sure about. All my hosted movies are 1080p and these days I just rent/buy from Amazon Prime Video if I really want to watch something that isn't on Netflix/Hulu/OnDemand via Directv

I've stated all that and I'm for the record not the one asking. Anytime you actually do REAL transcoding you will take a HIT. Think about it, the server is decoding and then re-encoding the video on the fly. There is no way that that's gonna work w/o taking a hit no matter the cores.
 
I've stated all that and I'm for the record not the one asking. Anytime you actually do REAL transcoding you will take a HIT. Think about it, the server is decoding and then re-encoding the video on the fly. There is no way that that's gonna work w/o taking a hit no matter the cores.

Transcoding doesn’t automatically use up all the processing power. A 1080p transcode uses about 15% on my 3900x. Modern Warfare 2019 uses about 30%. Why can’t I run the two with relatively minimal impact? As long as I’m not limited by memory bandwidth there’s no reason why I can’t. That’s the entire point of multi core processors.

If you’re doing an encode where your encoded/codec is going to use every cycle possible to finish the job that’s another story. But on the fly transcoding only needs to be fast enough to keep the video feed going.
 
Transcoding doesn’t automatically use up all the processing power. A 1080p transcode uses about 15% on my 3900x. Modern Warfare 2019 uses about 30%. Why can’t I run the two with relatively minimal impact? As long as I’m not limited by memory bandwidth there’s no reason why I can’t. That’s the entire point of multi core processors.

If you’re doing an encode where your encoded/codec is going to use every cycle possible to finish the job that’s another story. But on the fly transcoding only needs to be fast enough to keep the video feed going.

How much resource it uses is entirely up to you. Obviously that doesn't mean that its free. Each person will have to balance how much cpu to throw at it vs how much network bandwidth they have. That's was my original point. Hell a lot of the times people don't even know that Plex will always try to avoid transcoding, so they think hey it's awesome I'm transcoding everything and it doesn't use any resources lol.
 
How much resource it uses is entirely up to you. Obviously that doesn't mean that its free. Each person will have to balance how much cpu to throw at it vs how much network bandwidth they have. That's was my original point. Hell a lot of the times people don't even know that Plex will always try to avoid transcoding, so they think hey it's awesome I'm transcoding everything and it doesn't use any resources lol.

You can only get quality as high as your source. You can absolutely do both with minimal impact and get all the quality your compressed file has to offer


The second part of your post has nothing to do with this.
 
With a cpu affinity mask, you can lock your game and plex to different cores.
 
It depends on the source video. I can transcode a lot of my media on the fly without much effort as long as I'm not playing a super intense multi-threaded game.

But my personal media collection is acquiring more and more 4k h265 and, frankly, my gpu and cpu aren't fast enough to transcode it on the fly.

I just tell people using my plex account that 4k movies are "likely not going to work, I'm not Netflix, sorry."
 
and, frankly, my gpu and cpu aren't fast enough to transcode it on the fly.

I just tell people using my plex account that 4k movies are "likely not going to work, I'm not Netflix, sorry."

Haha, that made me lol.
 
I'd definitely (and do myself) have a separate machine for Plex (and NAS duties etc).

It's not that the CPU can't handle it, it's that you're introducing a stack of variables while gaming.
 
Just did some testing.

Previously when attempting to convert 4k. I could do it at .9 speed, which meant i was just BARELY too slow to actually do real time converting.

Apparently since I've last attempted that, either the plex transcoder or the nvidia hvec transcoder have improved and now I can transcode at 1.3. Which means I can handle it! Woo. (I remember the most recent version having notes about transcoding, maybe it actually is more efficient.)

I'll do some more testing to see how it works when my gpu is at load.
 
I'd imagine you could also start hitting some IO bottlenecks.
I'd definitely (and do myself) have a separate machine for Plex (and NAS duties etc).

It's not that the CPU can't handle it, it's that you're introducing a stack of variables while gaming.

This is the right way to go.


I picked up a 2700x + Motherboard + Ram for cheap to upgrade the i7-2600k NAS/Plex server. It can easily handle 3-4, 4K transcodes on the fly. I'd hate to have my gaming experience ruined by a bunch of transcodes popping up in the middle of a game.
 
We should finally be making enough that a dedicated transcode box seems like a possibility. I'll probably consider the idea as a way to use our old CPUs once I finally upgrade my current box to a 3900x.
 
I would just keep 2 machines. I just built a friend of mine a small server out of some stuff I had laying around just because of this same issue. He is running a 6 core 6800k and when people would stream it was killing him when he was playing games. He would get big lag spikes. He also has close to 5-10 people streaming from his plex at any time. His server is only a 4770k and 16gigs of ram running linux and it seams to keep up pretty well. I also run 2 systems 1 for gaming and 1 for my plex server. Granted I'm running dual E5-2630 v3 's and have 12 hot swap bays for my server. Also nice to have them sperate so you can run different OS's on them. I run unraid on my plex server. If I want to reinstall windows on my gaming rig or do something to one or the other they don't affect each other. Also I don't share any of my 4k content. My connection isn't fast enough to stream it native so I keep it in it's own folder and just don't share it.
 
You can add a small GPU like a 1050ti and make Plex use it for transcoding. Throw one in your extra PCIe slot.

I'm not doing that simply because I have a dedicated Xeon Freenas running plex.
 
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