Any codec won't let me choose Hardware encoding when selecting VBR 2 pass

[patrickhagot]

Dear community, i have been using and paying Adobe since 2009 and I would Love if one day i am contacted by Adobe and ask me what I think about their upcoming updates!! 
Why recently I can not use Hardware encoding when i choose VBR 2 pass in any codecs! That is totaly NOT LOGIC at all ? Why you changed it ? why it's not possible anymore. ? DO i have to go back to old version ? 
I have MacBook pro M1 Max Tahoe 26.0 

Thank you. 

[R Neil Haugen · Accepted solution]

No software that I know of actually does 2-pass hardware only ... not just Adobe.

Why?

Simple. It is not two passes of encoding!

The first pass it totally a CPU thing, as it analyzes the media involved. The second pass takes the data the CPU created in the first pass to make the encoded file.

And CPUs and GPUs use totally different mathematical and "computer grammatical" language. Ergo the CPU does the encoding from the data it created.

I've used Pr since CS6 era, and it couldn't do hardware on 2-pass encodes then either.

[RjL190365 · Accepted solution]

As Neil stated, "hardware" 2-pass encoding is impossible no matter what. The first pass, the analysis pass, is always software only no matter what program you use. And since no program can switch from software only to hardware acceleration at all in the middle of the exporting job, the encoding mode will stay locked to software only for the remainder of the exporting job. All encoder software has the very same limitation which cannot be circumvented at all.

The only way to get 2-pass hardware encoding would be with dedicated, extremely expensive and relatively huge (physical size-wise) video-only (no general purpose computing capability whatsoever) system.