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
Software encoding is the most fine tunable, because it’s software. For hardware solutions, you are limited by having to physically create a thing that does that specific operation – and more complex settings naturally mean a more complex machine to handle them. Hardware encoding is also usually geared towards speed and acceptable quality without using too many resources shared with other things – read: they are mostly for live streaming and capturing short gameplay highlights without taking performance away from that game.
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