Benefits of using hardware encoding on an Intel HD 630 with ShotCut

CPU Power vs GPU for Video Processing

Shotcut Video Editor

Hardware

My Fujitsu Esprimo Q957 is more of an office PC than a Video editing, Coding, 
CAD or hardware experimenter's platform. But for the space it takes on my much-too-small desk, it does an amazing job in all of the above disciplines.

• The i5-7500T processor sports four "real" cores at 2,7GHz and up to 3.3GHz for a while with TurboBoost. (Overview here.)
• It has an integrated HD Graphics, which is very far from being the pinnacle of GPU performance. There is a good description of it's capabilities here.
• I upgraded it to 16GByte RAM, which is of no concern in this context. More about the upgrade here.

CPU-Z shows the GPU

So all in all, I didn't think the integrated GPU could help me getting the jobs done more quickly.

Encoding on the Intel HD Graphics 630

A near 15 minute video I currently work on, needed an unusually high number of modifications. Each with a lot of noise from the fans running at full speed.

100% CPU

This took nearly 8 minutes at an unpleasant noise level. Time to investigate alternatives...

Let's try that...

Involving the GPU is amazingly efficient. Less CPU usage and the GPU at a little over 50%, along with somewhat less noise.

CPU-wise this does not look like a massive difference, bit it is.

The best part: Videos now encode in half the time. Much better than what I had expected from an integrated "Office-PC" GPU.

Success! Less than half the time :-)

PS: Here is the link to Shotcut (free and open source)

PPS: To my amazement, the tiny Fujitsu desktop easily outperforms my relatively recent Surface Laptop 2. The benchmark only shows a little over 10% difference ( https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-8350U-vs-Intel-Core-i5-7500T/m388461vsm218898 ), but the system takes 6 minutes for the same job as above, even with the help of it's Intel HD 620.