With Intel DPDK now in a fairly good state, it's actually fairly possible to get very attractive performance in userspace. You can leverage CPU instructions for

With Intel DPDK now in a fairly good state, it's actually fairly possible to get very attractive performance in userspace. You can leverage CPU instructions for crypto primitives when available to speed things up too. The amount of TCP hardware offload in linux right now is actually fairly limited. Kernel developers have largely rejected true in-hardware TCP stacks for a while now (although you can get this functionality with high end NICs and custom kernel builds). That said, since QUIC generally reduces the ack frequency it should be possible to match or exceed TCP with hardware offload. Especially when you look at total throughput with many streams open.