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> The hardware based encoding is not equivalent to software one; it is optimized for dumping compliant streams with low latency, it does not concern itself with
by formerly_proven 5y ago
> The hardware based encoding is not equivalent to software one; it is optimized for dumping compliant streams with low latency, it does not concern itself with effective use of the bits available. I.e. exactly what software based, offline encoders are good at.
This isn't my experience with NVENC for h.264. Sure, software encoding can do somewhat (but not a lot) better (quality per bits), but at a fraction of the performance and using much more energy. For most cases were you're personally encoding video it's likely better to use a hardware encoder.
- Cadwhisker 5y agoI have to agree with NVENC. I've benchmarked dozens of HW and SW encoders for quality (not just encoding speed) and it gives the best BD-Rate on average. For H.264, hardware can brute-force every possible Intra encoded macroblock and make rate-distortion-optimised QP/prediction decisions in real-time or better. This gets much harder for H.265, where brute-force is fairly impractical and the clever algorithm wins. A well-designed hardware codec can also run inter-frame block matching searches vastly more efficiently than software can.