Thats a great comparison. ~x265 medium is quite impressive for a hardware encoder, and it makes more sense than some questionable claims I saw from YouTubers.

I'm sure you have already read this, but AMD claims their new encoding ASIC can do even better: https://www.anandtech.com/show/18805/amd-announces-alveo-ma3...

> All told, AMD is making some fairly aggressive image quality claims with the Alveo MA35D; H.264 and H.265 image quality should be similar to x264 Medium and x265 Medium presets respectively, while the card’s AV1 encoding quality should be comparable to x265 slow.

Since it can do so many parallel streams, I can already see some mad hatter setting up av1an with one.