As a Patch.

Doubt it. It's not like the gaming world where they release-before-properly-tested / patch-to-make-barely-acceptable / then-retire-the-game. I think you are looking at a V16 unless it is already in the works for V15. But hey, maybe you get lucky. :)

Please add NVENC or Latest Support In Version 15

I hope it too, so it can finally give my titan-x some extra work. But indeed if it is not added already months ago in the development of 15, you can forget it will be in at release time.

Any thoughts about encoding quality?  I have heard that it is poor compared to cpu encoding but I have no first hand experience of this.

Any thoughts about encoding quality?  I have heard that it is poor compared to cpu encoding but I have no first hand experience of this.

Let us not sell the bear's skin before it is shot. We do not know yet if nvenc will be supported in vegas 15 ...

But if it would be, then I guess quality wise it may even depend on two things:

Firstly the source material (some parts will be done with better IQ with HW encoding than sw encoding and vice versa - as the encoding methods are likely to be different). And secondly the Nvidea HW architecture itself (e.g. Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal and next gen Volta).

e.g. A Pascal card supports HEVC Main10 10-bit hardware encoding, prior card types not.

The more recent the card the better the quality I suppose. Software encoding may always go the extra mile quality wise if you have the time and patience to let it encode...