hardware-accelerated encoding documentation

Yeah, tell me about it! When I went to check on recommended GPUs I noticed the list was over a year old...
One thing I can say with a fair degree of certainty is that when you see the section about "Hardware Accelerated Encoding/Decoding" this is basically only when you've got a GPU built into the CPU (which is basically only in laptops and obviously a sub-optimal setup). Intel has a set of dedicated instructions for their "video on CPU" chips. So unless that's your situation you'd want to leave that Off.

Still... considering how sparse the overall documentation is there's really not a lot of explanation for anything in terms of performance and setup. I mean, surely with all the dev. money put into each product you could get someone to to just sit down with an engineer and write up a couple of paragraphs (and then update them!) that explains the basics of what works best, what's supported and things to avaoid. This has been a problem for many years, but we can always hope...