Shotcut Export Options Compared (March 2021 - Shotcut v21)
I compare Shotcut exporting speed and file sizes with hardware acceleration, without, and with parallel processing. This info is up to date as of Mar 2021, using Shotcut 21.02.27
Long story short, hardware acceleration makes a pretty decent difference. If you've got a newer machine, use both hardware acceleration AND parallel processing for a pretty decent performance bump.
Test setup:
PC1:
Core i5-4690k
16GB DDR3
Geforce 1060
PC2
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
32 GB DDR4
Geforce 1070
PC3
AMD Ryzen 5 3400G
16GB DDR4
Radeon Vega11 on-chip GPU
Files were exported using the "YouTube" preset, (55% VBR with libx264 for soft encoding and h264_nvenc for hardware encoder)
00:00 Intro and Overview
01:06 Speed charts
03:37 File size comparison
05:10 Using your computer while rendering
07:26 Quality comparison
08:11 Conclusion