System Recommendations

To optimize the performance of your NVIDIA graphics board, it is recommended to use the "Prefer maximum performance" value for the "Power management mode" parameter in the NVIDIA Control Panel.

Cinegy Convert supports the hardware-accelerated encoding for H.264 4:2:0, Cinegy Daniel2, and HEVC NVIDIA GPU video codecs. The codecs are highly recommended to use for high-density output formats like HD/UHD.

Daniel2 GPU encoding and decoding are supported by NVIDIA video boards that have CUDA Compute Capability 3.5 and higher. If the NVIDIA video board has the CUDA Compute Capability of an earlier version, then use Daniel2 CPU encoding and decoding.

To be able to use the encoding hardware acceleration you will need to install the NVIDIA graphic board (based on Maxwell generation GPU) into the Cinegy Convert server:

Please note that the GeForce and lower Quadro Series (Quadro 600) has a limitation of 8 concurrent encoding streams, therefore if you use these boards, you won’t be able to record more than eight H.264 files at the same time by using the NVIDIA hardware acceleration. For further details, you can refer to the Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix on the NVIDIA Developer webpage.

If you are going to use multiple encoding (more than 2 streams), it is recommended to use the Maxwell or Pascal generation of GPU (recommended board is NVIDIA Quadro P1000 or higher); if you do not need more than two streams, you can use the modern GeForce Series (e.g., NVIDIA GTX 960).

The actual performance of a machine depends on the number of running simultaneous tasks, their TV formats, as well as various settings like the number of encoders used, the complexity of encoding profiles, etc. Therefore, no precise hardware recommendation can be given. As Cinegy Convert has no requirements to perform faster than the real-time speed, virtually any modern machine can be used.

These system recommendations use older hardware that has been previously tested. The listed CPUs should be used as a guide to select modern equivalent options and not as direct requirements.

The following configuration has proven to be reliably sufficient for up to 4 simultaneous HD transcoding tasks using a single encoder: Supermicro Superserver 1028 series platform, dual Xeon E5 2630v3 CPU, 8x 4GB of DDR4 RAM, SATA-2 SSD drive for OS.