@Richvideo The Arc would give you more formats but I'd be surprised if an a770 could process fx and timelines as well as a 2080. But you could get the best of both worlds adding an inexpensive a380 as a 2nd gpu. They're about the same encoding and decoding.

Btw, you can get very similar quality and file size advantages from hevc as from av1... I upload in 10-bit hevc to vimeo and youtube all the time. I did try av1 made with Voukoder 11.1 Arc_beta and youtube took it fine... but they transcode to vp9 so I'd rather send them vp9_qsv. But no ones got that yet that I know of.

@Richvideo The Arc would give you more formats but I'd be surprised if an a770 could process fx and timelines as well as a 2080. But you could get the best of both worlds adding an inexpensive a380 as a 2nd gpu. They're about the same encoding and decoding.

Btw, you can get very similar quality and file size advantages from hevc as from av1... I upload in 10-bit hevc to vimeo and youtube all the time. I did try av1 made with Voukoder 11.1 Arc_beta and youtube took it fine... but they transcode to vp9 so I'd rather send them vp9_qsv. But no ones got that yet that I know of.

I only have room for one GPU in my Alienware case...In order to run two GPUs I assume that I would need some sort of external enclosure.

I thought that AV 1 files are supposed to be more condensed than HEVC ?

Personally I looked at both and got a 2080 Super for use in Vegas as overall the NVIDIA is a more capable card. Intel ARC drivers are still a work in progress that I would rather not deal with.

For HW graphics card, my understanding is, as long as you're running in the 400$ circle, you do only get that 400$ performance, brand or generation has very limited influence.

@Richvideo

... I thought that AV 1 files are supposed to be more condensed than HEVC ?

Thought that too till I just tested it. Hevc and av1 are both allot smaller for given quality than avc, which doesn't officially support 10-bit. But hevc gave me slightly smaller files and higher quality readings than av1 with the Voukoder 11.1 Arc beta, which is the only version that renders av1_qsv. Ffmpeg daily behaves the same, although both hevc_qsv and av1_qsv encode 2x faster than Voukoder with substantially higher quality readings... but the av1 implementation generated allot of DTS error message chatter in the log which I imagine is why av1 is missing from ffmpeg and Voukoder release versions. It is in the latest Handbrake Nightly, however, and runs about 10% faster than Voukoder, but delivers a little bit lower quality readings than either Voukoder or ffmpeg.

I think av1's strong attraction is that it's functionally equal to hevc without the licensing costs and hassles. Now that low cost hardware encoders are starting to appear, I expect it'll take off as soon as the chips can be fitted into cameras.