> We're using it for RDP/KVM-type video, so for us the quality loss is indeed quite "small". Our users care more about "can I read the text clearly?" and less about color-banding. The hardware accelerators do a great job with text clarity so for our use-case it's not much of a noticeable quality loss.

This is a perfect use case for hardware video acceleration.

The hardware encoder blocks are great for anything live streaming related. The video they produce uses a lot higher bitrate and has lower quality than what you could get with a CPU encoder, but if doing a lot of real-time encodes is important then they deliver.