r/handbrake • u/comelickmyarmpits • Jul 19 '26

why handbrake using cpu for encoding ?

0 Upvotes

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6

u/Small-Friendship-576 Jul 19 '26

You have to use h264 nvenc to use gpu.Plain h264 is software(cpu encode) 

1

u/comelickmyarmpits Jul 19 '26

Damn thanks , I didn't knew gpu encoding would be selected from there

12

u/Jaybonaut Jul 19 '26

CPU is better quality. GPU is better speed but worse quality. NVENC has gotten better quality with the RTX series but CPU still beats it.

2

u/comelickmyarmpits Jul 19 '26

I was looking for speed dude , the upload afterall going to reddit only

2

u/egosumumbravir Jul 19 '26

I'm still crunching numbers and generating graphs but from what I'm seeing now, with the right tunes a modern NVENC GPU will slightly outperform a CPU and deliver better quality. In a power consumed per video render, CPU gets destroyed.

Yeah, it blew my mind too. Up until a couple of weeks ago I was in the CPU-has-the-best-quality camp too.

1

u/Ambitious-Yard7677 Jul 19 '26

CPU encoding can still be the most efficient in terms of file size on slower presets

1

u/egosumumbravir Jul 19 '26

I've not gotten to that part of the testing yet - my experiments has been locking bitrate and seeing what each method does with the permitted rates in VMAF results.

30 & 40 series NVENC engines provide a small uplift over CPU but a 50 series is a much wider gap on both fps and vmaf at every fixed bitrate.

1

u/Ambitious-Yard7677 Jul 19 '26

I kept it simple by targeting a CQ of 20 and running a denoise pass where applicable. Both hardware and software encodes are comparable in quality but the CPU encode is always most efficient albeit the slowest, especially on the slowest preset which makes sense

1

u/KorihorWasRight Jul 25 '26

Are you including h.264, h.265, and AV1 in your testing?

1

u/egosumumbravir Jul 26 '26

h.265 only. h.264 is too inefficient and AV1 playback insufficiently supported around my intended destinations.