VBR 2 HARDWARE ENCODING !!!???

My system can play RED R3D files with ease. No need for the After Burner card. I also think you should be complaining about the After Burner Card in the Apple forums not here. Intel's new CPUs might support multipass for H.264/265 but who knows for sure? Having said that as of now Adobe is up to par with the other NLE.

Yea. It's frustrating, but ... it is as it is.

Neil

No. It cannot be fixed at all by anybody or any company. No hardware encoder has ever supported 2-pass VBR at all whatsoever. Not even the newest encoders in second-gen AMD RDNA and the Nvidia Ampere architecture. And selecting 2-pass VBR will ALWAYS force software-only encoding no matter what. Previous versions of Premiere Pro would give an error message that hardware encoding is not supported at the chosen export settings. Some newer versions of Premiere Pro would allow you to proceed with "hardware encoding" at the 2-pass VBR settings, but will immediately and automatically switch to software encoding with absolutely no warning or indication whatsoever, and remain there for the remainder of the export job.

Not only that, but hardware encoders for PC have a strict video bitrate limit of around 50 Mbps. If one exceeds that bitrate for the export, then the hardware encoder will default to a much lower, fail-safe bitrate of only 16 Mbps. The only way to use 2-pass VBR or bitrates higher than 50 Mbps, then you will have to use software-only encoding no matter which GPU-based encoder hardware you have.