Why is software encoding ‘better’ than hardware encoding? (Video Editing)

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I have been a video editor for a few years now, semi-professionally, I always found out that hardware encoders (NVENC and Quicksync) often produce worse results than software encoders – they look worse and have a bigger file size.
Although they are MUCH faster than software encoders.

This doesn’t make any sense to me, we now have hardware accelerated AI & RT that’s much faster AND better, why can’t the same be said for encoders?

Edit: I have an RTX 4070 Ti Super, so I use NVENC for HW encoding

In: Technology

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Hardware encoders are made to be fast. That’s their purpose. Since encoding process is actually very complicated, there is always a trade off between quality and speed.

Software encoders quality heavily depends on algorithms implemented, and so a couple of creative guys could make a better encoder than some organization. x264 was pretty much done by a couple of guys. He’re is an old irq quote from one of the x264 devs:

<pengvado> <xxthink> but why, such as mainconcept, can’t produce a much better product than x264?
<pengvado> because they’re a company, and we’re a couple of guys in our basements. obviously, in such a competition, the couple of guys win.

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