NVENC is trash, fast trash, but trash none the less. Encode the same source file with FFMPEG at the same bitrate using NVENC and the CPU and the loss of quality

NVENC is trash, fast trash, but trash none the less. Encode the same source file with FFMPEG at the same bitrate using NVENC and the CPU and the loss of quality with NVENC is readily visible. NVDEC is fine, but if you're encoding with the CPU, you'll lose performance moving the frames over to the CPU. Sure you can offload it all with NVDEC+NVENC, but only if your only criteria is speed, rather than quality or file size.