Correct, but Epyc "reigns supreme" for anyone caring about performance / total FPS throughput, which is relevant for anyone who cares about TFA at all - the purpose of using GPU is to "go faster", and that's what Epyc offers for use cases that also care about extreme fidelity.

> I wouldn't call it a small quality loss. The hardware encoders are tuned for different priorities like live streaming. They have lower quality and/or much higher bitrate.

Sure. It absolutely depends on your use case. We're using it for RDP/KVM-type video, so for us the quality loss is indeed quite "small". Our users care more about "can I read the text clearly?" and less about color-banding. The hardware accelerators do a great job with text clarity so for our use-case it's not much of a noticeable quality loss. I will admit the colors are very noticeably distorted, but the shapes are correct and the contrast/sharpness is good.

Using 0% of the CPU and GPU for encoding is a HUGE win that's totally worth it for us - hardware costs stay super low. Using really old bottom of the barrel CPU's for 30+ simultaneous encodes feels like cheating. Hardware-accelerated encoding also provides another massive win by tangibly reducing latency for our users vs CPU/GPU encoding (it's not just the throughput that's improved, each live frame gets through the pipeline faster too).

I wouldn't use COTS hardware accelerators for archiving Blu-Ray videos. Hell I'm not even aware of any COTS hardware accelerators that support HDR ... they probably exist but I've never stumbled across one. But hardware-accelerated encoding really is ideal for a lot of other stuff, especially when you care about CapEx at scale. If you're at the scale of Netflix or YouTube, you can get custom silicon made that can provide ASIC acceleration for any quality you like. That said, they seem to choose to degrade video quality to save money all the way to the point that 10-20% of their users hate the quality (myself included, quality is one of the primary reasons I use PassThePopcorn instead of the legal streaming services), but that's a business choice, not a technical limitation of ASIC acceleration (that's if you have the scale to pay for custom silicon...COTS solutions absolutely DO have a noticeable quality loss, as you argue).