@diverG thanks for the reply! Did you notice and difference in video quality between the Nvidia and QuickSync?

What I am trying to get information on, is there a difference in video quality between using Intel iGPU, CPU or graphics card. Also, if there is a rendering speed difference. There are many options in building a computer, getting what works best with what you are using (or plan to use) helps in determining hardware purchases.

In my case rendering to mp4 within vegas specifying intel QSV renders shows little use is made of igpu when viewed in Taskmaster; 5% if lucky. Using the same file set Vegas, 8 minutes, edius 1 minute. Using vegas, nvidia about 1 minute, same with vucoder but this appears to use igpu. Edius uses about 70/80% igpu, whilst vegas makes better use of nvidia GPU. Have no experience with AMD. No crashes with either NLE.

Either files viewed on tv show no discernible difference. Comparing files via compositing show small differences File sizes are similar. I'm in 80's so eyes not at peak performance .

Thanks @diverG for your input.

And don't worry about your eyes, I am not too far behind you!

I haven't really seen any definitive quality trends myself (hardware vrs software) but I haven't had a chance to pick up the Magic lossless plugins yet. My conclusion so far is that the gpu drivers or Windows itself must have gotten better... based on my pretty clear and widely held perception that Intel qsv yielded the worse looking renders back when VP16 was current. But now, vce and qsv renders with VP16 (which has not been updated since then) looks like they're delivering top notch quality right up there with Magix MainConcept and followed closely by nvenc. My Quality Tables here.

Gerald Undone uses and recommends NVENC technologies

He talks about NVENC at 10minute mark

You put decoding in the title but what did you want to know about that?

In Vegas there are some media that can only be decoded with Intel iGPUs or where NVDEC is unreliable. If you search the forum you'll see threads on this.

11th generation Intel CPUs can also do hardware decoding of 422 HEVC which is nearly unplayable on most systems. If you're just dealing with 8 bit AVC none of this matters though.

@RogerS when buying computer hardware, you would want the best bang and most compatible with the software you have. Hence my reason about decoding/encoding and quality of the render

Some people here say they only use software to render, others hardware. Timeline playback, what makes it "smoother" besides going to Draft.

I know all of this is clip dependent, as with rendering out is depending on which settings you choose.

I see, well for timeline playback, hardware decoding matters greatly. Unfortunately there isn't much data available to use to compare GPUs. You can see the https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/benchmarking-results-continued--118503/ results for a hint as to how they compare on a sample project (Average FPS).

I think the biggest difference is whether the file type is supported at all, as I mentioned above, so my next processor will likely be an Intel because it works well in Vegas and the hardware decoding seems to be the most advanced and reliable.

Rendering speed I care less about and do software x.264 rendering with Voukoder. The benchmarking results linked to above show the difference between different CPUs and GPUs for rendering. I don't see a clear winner here with QSV holding its own against VCE and NVENC.

@Howard-Vigorita, WOW! You tested all of that yourself?

I did. Over the course of several weeks. One interesting thing I noticed was that if I used the same version of Vegas, I got identical qsv quality results from my laptop and 9900k machines which have radically different cpu packages containing the uhd630. Same with a Nuc whose low-power, 4-core cpu contains a slightly different hd630 along with an amd Vega/m.

@Howard-Vigorita an amazing amount of work for one person!