That's possible, but if you look at nvidia, the whole range uses the same hardware accelerator, so at most it is a difference in term of chip generation, not so

That's possible, but if you look at nvidia, the whole range uses the same hardware accelerator, so at most it is a difference in term of chip generation, not so much GPU model. I am not saying GPU hw decoding isn't useful, it certainly is in term of power consumption, and the CPU might be better used for something else happening at the same time. But in term of raw throughput it's not clear that a GPU beats a recent CPU.