I'll preface this by saying that I know next to nothing about graphics cards, so I may not even be able to understand some of your responses if they're too technical.
The rig in question is the one in my sig with an i7-8700. I built this (with the help of my brother in law) for the sole purpose of being a Blue Iris "PC-NVR". All components were designed around the hardware requirements of Blue Iris, which is optimized to run off Intel QSV. Supposedly, even using a high end graphics card would be less efficient than using QSV in the program. Therefore, I never had a need for a dedicated graphics card.
Fast-forward to today and I'm currently vetting alternative options to Blue Iris, as I've found the program to be quite problematic and the developer to be a complete ass. Some alternative software is also optimized to run on QSV but still has support for dedicated graphics. And other programs don't really specify. Every one I've seen supporting dedicated graphics cards has mentioned Nvidia graphics cards, with some specifying cuda cores (whatever that means). My surveillance cameras native encoding is h264 or h265, though I'd want to keep the option open to add other cameras which might use different codecs.
In addition, this machine has also turned into a Plex server, so it regularly handles transcoding jobs. I dont know if its Plex or the CPU, but sometimes the transcoding really struggles when only 1 video is being transcoded.
With this pandemic, Ive been using the machine to work from home. I use an AOC 32" 4k monitor on DP, and I added a verfy old Dell monitor thats connected via DVI-D to HDMI adapter. That's all the available ports on my motherboard.
I'm trying to figure out if I would benefit from adding a dedicated graphics card. I'd like to be able to push another 4k monitor, or maybe a couple 1440p monitors to extend my workstation. And I'd like optimal video processing, beit in the surveillance software or in Plex. On very rare occasions, I do some light video processing in Movie Studio or similar software. I do not game at all.
What are your thoughts on adding a card? And if I should, what are some recommendations?
The rig in question is the one in my sig with an i7-8700. I built this (with the help of my brother in law) for the sole purpose of being a Blue Iris "PC-NVR". All components were designed around the hardware requirements of Blue Iris, which is optimized to run off Intel QSV. Supposedly, even using a high end graphics card would be less efficient than using QSV in the program. Therefore, I never had a need for a dedicated graphics card.
Fast-forward to today and I'm currently vetting alternative options to Blue Iris, as I've found the program to be quite problematic and the developer to be a complete ass. Some alternative software is also optimized to run on QSV but still has support for dedicated graphics. And other programs don't really specify. Every one I've seen supporting dedicated graphics cards has mentioned Nvidia graphics cards, with some specifying cuda cores (whatever that means). My surveillance cameras native encoding is h264 or h265, though I'd want to keep the option open to add other cameras which might use different codecs.
In addition, this machine has also turned into a Plex server, so it regularly handles transcoding jobs. I dont know if its Plex or the CPU, but sometimes the transcoding really struggles when only 1 video is being transcoded.
With this pandemic, Ive been using the machine to work from home. I use an AOC 32" 4k monitor on DP, and I added a verfy old Dell monitor thats connected via DVI-D to HDMI adapter. That's all the available ports on my motherboard.
I'm trying to figure out if I would benefit from adding a dedicated graphics card. I'd like to be able to push another 4k monitor, or maybe a couple 1440p monitors to extend my workstation. And I'd like optimal video processing, beit in the surveillance software or in Plex. On very rare occasions, I do some light video processing in Movie Studio or similar software. I do not game at all.
What are your thoughts on adding a card? And if I should, what are some recommendations?