I believe most of these benchmarks were set at a time when you simply couldn't run x265 on “slow” on any reasonable CPU if you ever wanted it to complete. But y

I believe most of these benchmarks were set at a time when you simply couldn't run x265 on “slow” on any reasonable CPU if you ever wanted it to complete. But yes, I'd really like CPU benchmarkers to move to higher-quality presets for video encoding, because they do tend to have different kinds of performance curves. Fun fact: There's no point in running x265 on the fastest presets unless you absolutely need to have HEVC; x264 on slow is faster _and_ gives better quality per bit. See the second graph on https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2015/09/28/vp9-encodingdecoding-performance-vs-hevch-264/ https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2015/09/28/vp9-encodingdecod... (a few years old, the situation is likely to look similar but not identical).