True, but that's only for delivery. A good editor like Resolve runs mostly on the GPU, even when rendering for delivery -- whether the encoder also uses the GPU

True, but that's only for delivery. A good editor like Resolve runs mostly on the GPU, even when rendering for delivery -- whether the encoder also uses the GPU is a separate matter. For what it's worth, h.264 GPU encoders are good enough nowadays that there isn't much point using x264 at a fraction of the performance. In my mind this makes it preferable to opt for a stronger GPU, if you have to decide between a stronger CPU or a stronger GPU (e.g. you have 300 $ left in your budget and want to decide where to put them).