Comment by avidiax

Yeah, this is a very common misconception. There are hardware encoders that might be distribution quality, but these are (to my knowledge) expensive ASICs that Netflix, Amazon, Google, etc. use to accelerate encode (not necessarily to realtime) and improve power efficiency.

GPU acceleration could be used to accelerate a CPU encode in a quality-neutral way, but NVENC and the various other HW accelerators available to end users are designed for realtime encoding for broadcast or for immediate storage (for example, to an SD card).

For distribution, you can either distribute the original source (if bandwidth and space are no concern), or you can ideally encode in a modern, efficient codec like x265 or AV1. AV1 might be particularly useful if you have a noisy source, since denoising and classification of the noise is part of the algorithm. The reference software encoders are considered the best quality, but often the slowest, options.

GPU is best if you need to temporarily transcode (for Plex), or you want to make a working copy for temporary distribution before a final encode.