Seriously. I hate when people assume default settings are the only option. You don’t even need a Plex account to set up Plex. It will just be less seamless and user friendly. Never adopt the server, configure these via localhost (ssh tunnel works) and then set up your networking. Don’t even need to update it, it will run for as long as the database stays stable. Which should be years or more.

I have a 3080 also. It’s only just starting to show it’s age with some of these new UE5 games. A couple weeks ago discovered dlssg-to-fsr3 and honestly i’ll take the little bit of latency for some smoother gameplay

For sure the quality will be worse than software but typically if I’m away from home I’m watching on an ipad and then you really can’t tell the difference.

EDIT: I meant QSV Gen 7, which would be intel Gen 11. Kaby Lake and up can still handle HEVC in hardware but they have to use software as well for 4K.

worth mentioning that any intel cpu with an iGPU from generation 7 (kaby lake) and up can handle 4k hevc transcode in hardware. i just upgraded my plex box to an i7 8700K and it works quite well. an old office workstation with like a 9th or 11th gen intel cpu would probably rip through transcodes.