Getting My Tesla P4 to work, even though it is recognized by the system!

[Rav3nOn3]

So I have recently started using TrueNAS scale to host my own Plex media server, as we all know... this is nothing new here in this community. So everything is set up and working well, and I decided to drop in a Tesla P4 like so many do in this community, and it's wonderfully recognized by the system no issue when i enter LSPCI -V into the shell, shows me the driver version and all. In the Plex app I was able to "add" one nvidia gpu using the drop down menu, although I have no idea if that is even doing anything since it's displayed so generically. and in the advanced settings in the main system config menus it shows only the iGPU in the isolated GPU drop down. is there some kind of code i need to use in the shell to enable this GPU? I would eventually like to play around with virtualization as well. This is my first post so take it easy on me, lol, I have read many other threads but none "seem" to touch what I'm specifically talking about. Thanks everyone. I have attached photos for reference.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Hi @Rav3nOn3

Try starting a stream in Plex that would use hardware transcoding (ensuring that you have a Plex pass, or any other soft-requirements) and then run nvidia-smi to see if it shows a process utilizing the card.

 

[Rav3nOn3]

Hey there and thanks for the fast reply, so I do have a yearly plex pass and the option in the settings menu shows that I will use hardware transcoding when available, which you can see in the attached picture. However I am unsure how to know what will use transcoding, I played one of my 4k movies on my phone as well as on my PC and when I used NVIDIA-SMI command in the shell it is not showing any VRAM usage. So I guess the next step is figuring out how to trigger hardware transcoding so that I may see the physical use of the VRAM to know for sure that it is working. However everything would point to it working, since the P4 shows up in all of my apps and settings. So is there a specific way I can make transcoding happen?

 

[HoneyBadger]

I'm not a Plex user myself (prefer Jellyfin) but if you manually set a different/lower resolution or bitrate than your source file, it should hopefully leverage your GPU to transcode it. I did find some quick notes on searching about HDR tonemapping potentially causing hardware acceleration to fail, but it seemed to apply to the Windows install of Plex only.

 

[Rav3nOn3]

Okay that's great information I'll definitely have a look at that when I'm back home in the lab lol. I did notice that HDR tone mapping is an option in Plex as well perhaps disable that in the app if the first option doesn't work. Slow but sure I am figuring this out... Thanks for you're help!

My next experiment is to figure out how to enable virtualization in the bios because right now it says that my cpu cannot do virtualization. The P4 being equivalent to a 1070 should be a decent option for this. Next small form factor card I get is an A2000

 

[Rav3nOn3]

Okay, great news... Everything is working as it should! I switched the format on my phone to 720p HD and dis NVIDIA-SMI and it was showing 4 GB being used and 11 percent of the GPU being utilized! Thanks for all your information on this matter, we can now call this thread resolved!

Cheers!