Recording with OBS - [HEVC Encoding on Steam Deck] vs [AV1 Encoding...

In my previous post, I mentioned my attempts about replacing my outdated main laptop with a particular Mini PC. My research (hint: conversations with AI) covered a few devices that fit the criteria below:

It must be AMD.
It must have 32GB of RAM or more.
It must have 1TB SSD storage or better.
It must be Zen 4.

In that article, I took a closer look a Minisforum UM760 which boasts a Zen 4 APU fulfilling just enough of the requirements I put above. I used AI to get an estimation for how it'll perform on games that my Steam Deck can't run like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

Zen 4 APU come with Radeon iGPUs with RDNA 3 architecture, which should have hardware video encoding more advanced than my current hardware.

As someone who posts game-play videos occasionally, I want to be able to record games with OBS, so I made sure to research. I also looked up streaming games via Steam Link, and if the device can handle recording videos and streaming with Steam Link at the same time.

To my surprise, RDNA 3 chips which come with all Zen 4 APUs I researched has Hardware support for AV1 encoding.

That's where I started researching AV1 encoding and how it'd do with 7640HS 760M. I collected quite a bit of data, and I used my AI Data to HTML Charts Prompt with Venice.ai to process it into these charts below:

OBS Encoder Quality:

From what I learned, just switching to Zen 4's more efficient architecture is enough to improve quality and compression, even if both devices used HEVC had the same raw power. Zen 4 is more smart and will generally keep more of important data while avoiding redundant bits during encoding.

From what I learned, AV1 is a great choice for 1080p at low bit rates, (my target resolution,) and it should make my videos quality even better, because I already upload my videos with low bit rates anyway.

OBS Encoder Performance:

AV1 hardware encoding shouldn't cause any noticeable performance hit for most games. Contrast that with my Steam Deck where the hardware HEVC encoding produces big file sizes for the quality, and the software encoding uses too much CPU power for me to be able to play heavy games at a good frame rate...