This one should be relatively short. I recently added a GPU to my Plex server (the NVIDIA GTX-1650 – maybe this one). In and of itself, that’s not so exciting, although the shuffling of things around to get all of the SATA drives spinning while making use of the single PCIe slot on the board was a bit of fun to be sure. I ended up using a M.2 to SATA adapter that actually works quite well. In any case, I thought it was simply a matter of turning on hardware acceleration on the Plex server, as Debian seemed to have detected the card. To do this, go to Settings – Transcoder and then tick “Use hardware-accelerated video encoding”.

I noticed, however, that when I was watching various films, the GPU wasn’t doing anything. There’s a good explanation on the Plex website about how this works, and how this should work, that you can read here. The solution to my problem was to install the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. There are comprehensive instructions for the various flavours of Debian available here. In my case, I’m using Debian 12, so I ran this command:

apt install nvidia-driver firmware-misc-nonfree

Once I did that (and following the reboot, etc), I noticed that Plex was actually using the GPU to do video encoding (where required) and everything was great. Of course, in my home I want to be using Direct Play, but if I’m outside my home I’ll generally need the server to do some transcoding to meet bandwidth limitations.

The NVIDIA Proprietary Drivers also give you access to a tool called nvidia-smi, which is handy if you want to see what’s happening with the GPU too.

Have I found this to be a great improvement in my remote Plex experience? It’s too soon to say. But I’ll report back when I’ve done some more testing. And yes, I know the GPU is old, but so is the server, and so am I for that matter.