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x265 is not using HW for decoding so it's very heavy on the CPU.

Please don't confuse "x265" and "H.265 / HEVC"

At least on paper, some hardware h.265 decoding is supported on Intel since Haswell (2013), on nVidia since Maxwell 2-nd gen (2015), on AMD since Polaris (2016).

Is it possible to (ab)use that hardware support to do other tasks by mapping them to a decoding task?

Dunno. Why would you want to? You can already compute lots of stuff on GPUs.

Couple generations ago, AMD did the other way, they used GPU shader ALUs for video encoding/decoding. They stopped doing that because power efficiency is worse than custom silicon that’s now in all modern GPUs, even in mobile SoCs.

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