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

Question

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

Answer 1

Hardware encoders are limited to specific settings in the encoding software because every part of the process has to be doable in the hardware.

Software encoders can use any settings you want because it’s all run on general purpose processing, it’s just slower because it’s not specialized.