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Ant Media Server can use hardware-based encoder that is available in some NVIDIA GPUs. If you have a NVIDIA GPU, you can check that your GPU contains hardware-based encoder on Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix

Answer is Performance. Performance increases 5x over x264(CPU) encoder. Btw, x264 is one of the best h.264 software encoder and Ant Media Server uses x264 if there is no GPU in the system.

After you are sure that your GPU contains hardware-based encoder, the only thing is installing CUDA toolkit to your system.

Download the deb file

wget https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1604/x86_64/cuda-repo-ubuntu1604_10.1.105-1_amd64.deb

Install repository meta-data

sudo dpkg -i cuda-repo-ubuntu1604_10.1.105-1_amd64.deb

Install CUDA Public GPG Key

sudo apt-key adv --fetch-keys http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1604/x86_64/7fa2af80.pub

Download the deb file

wget https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1804/x86_64/cuda-repo-ubuntu1804_10.1.105-1_amd64.deb

Install repository meta-data

sudo dpkg -i cuda-repo-ubuntu1804_10.1.105-1_amd64.deb

Install CUDA Public GPG Key

sudo apt-key adv --fetch-keys http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1804/x86_64/7fa2af80.pub

Update repository cache

sudo apt-get update

Install CUDA Runtime 10.0

sudo apt-get install cuda-runtime-10-0

If you've installed latest version of CUDA runtime(such 10.1) and it does not work, you can install following packets for compatibility

sudo apt install cuda-cudart-10-0
sudo apt install cuda-compat-10-0 

You can install Ant Media Server with its usual way or if you already install it, you can restart the Ant Media Server.

sudo service antmedia restart

If everthing is ok, you can run the command below to see the status of your GPU

nvidia-smi

Ant Media Server will check and log at startup if there is a hardware-based GPU encoder in the system and it will use it automatically. No need to do anything.

To check if Ant Media Server uses GPU;

• Enable h.264 encoding
• Enable adaptive streaming bu adding at least one adaptive resolution
• Run nvidia-smi command and check the output. If Ant Media Server is listed as a process as in the picture below, this means you successfully configured GPU.

On host(Ubuntu 16.04)

• Install docker-ce according to the link - https://docs.docker.com/install/
• Install nvidia-docker2

curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/nvidia-docker/gpgkey | \
  sudo apt-key add -
distribution=$(. /etc/os-release;echo $ID$VERSION_ID)
curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/nvidia-docker/$distribution/nvidia-docker.list | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nvidia-docker.list
sudo apt-get update

# Install nvidia-docker2 and reload the Docker daemon configuration
sudo apt-get install -y nvidia-docker2
sudo pkill -SIGHUP dockerd

• Start a docker container with following command

sudo docker run --runtime=nvidia \
 --privileged --network host --name cuda-docker2 \
 -e NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=all -e NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES=compute,utility,video \
 -it nvidia/cuda:10.0-runtime-ubuntu16.04

In this docker container, you can install Ant-Media-Server Enterprise edition. It automatically uses hardware encoder

If you need more information for installing on other systems, please check NVIDIA docs and CUDA downloads pages