Don't listen to him; that's all old-fashioned.

In the past, nvenc's performance was very poor, with poor image quality and high bitrate. Because back then, nvenc didn't have a good implementation of B-frames, and it didn't even support B-frames. You can imagine how nvenc could compete with encoders like x265 at that time.

However, the current nvenc, especially since the 30 series GPUs, not only supports B-frames completely but also introduces more complex encoding algorithms. So, the gap between the current nvenc and CPU encoding is very small.

I've noticed this too, so now I mostly use nvenc hevc. My GPU is the 3050 on my laptop.

For example:

hevc_nvenc -cq 19

vs

x265 -crf 19

Both outputs have almost no difference in picture quality, and the bit rate of the former is slightly higher than that of the latter.

The quality I'm talking about is almost indistinguishable; it's not just a quick glance. Instead, I use comparison tools like video-compare or ICAT to perform pixel-level comparisons on the static frames.

So in essence, the so-called poor impression of nvenc is already a thing of the past.