In the past (with h265 / h264 at least), hardware encoding always ended up with visibly worse quality (and often even bigger file sizes) compared to a software encoder like x264/x265.
Do you happen to know if that's still the case?
(I guess for use-cases such as live streaming it doesn't matter that much, but for video that ends up in some archive, it's probably less acceptable)
That's usually the case as the hardware encoders tend to make tradeoffs in the direction of lower transistor count / faster frame processing while software encoders have the luxury of going for higher quality.
Yes, a YouTuber named EposVox released a video on AV1 hardware encoding when the first Intel dGPUs with support for it released: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctbTTRoqZsM
Later on in the video, there are some graphs comparing Intel's AV1 encoder to SVT-AV1 at different speed presets. Even one of the faster presets (9) will comfortably stay above AV1 quality according to VMAF, and if you don't need real-time speeds you can lower the preset to get further ahead of the hardware encoder. (BTW: That video is >1 year old now, and SVT-AV1 had some significant updates in the meantime too. So the software side is probably looking better now.)
It's around 5% (maybe 10%?) larger file sizes for same visual quality at the moment. For archival I think that's fine, as storage is cheap, it can still be a problem when you pay for outbound bandwidth to users.
Do you happen to know if that's still the case?
(I guess for use-cases such as live streaming it doesn't matter that much, but for video that ends up in some archive, it's probably less acceptable)