BirdDog Connect & Nvidia Encoding (NVENC)

The preferred way to encode on BirdDog Connect is to use a GPU encoding method. Specifically, Nvidia graphic cards use acceleration that allows users to leverage the processing power of the GPU and take the workload off the CPU. This is far more efficient than encoding x264 on the CPU.

However, this will introduce some extra latency as the Connect worker has to send frames to and from the Nvidia card.

It is also worth mentioning that a high spec CPU may be able to handle more streams than a Nvidia card can in some circumstances.

The following link is a page by Nvidia which shows the Nvidia card line that is capable of doing NVENC and Total Number of Concurrent Streams. Pay attention to those two columns while picking a GPU for your Cloud endpoint: https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new