This is something that I've been torn on with all of the M1 benchmarks. All of the benchmarks that are saying "the M1 is so much better than my Intel machine at video work" are all taking advantage of hardware video encode / decode blocks in the M1 (and unified memory between the GPU and video codecs).
Discounting their existence is entirely unfair, as one of the whole points of Apple Silicon is to give Apple the opportunity to put whatever hardware into their computer that accelerates the use cases they envision for their computers. Dedicated hardware is way more power efficient that software implementations.
However, what happens if you work in a video codec that Apple didn't build in hardware support for? Software video codecs depend heavily on SIMD instructions to be performant.
In the first place, using the hardware encoder is only feasible if the output is up to your quality/size standards and is compatible with the decoders that are going to consume your content. If your goal is to quickly render near-lossless mp4/mkv files for uploading to youtube, any regular old hardware encoder is probably fine. If your goal is to render out 6000kbps footage to store on your own CDN, the quality per bit becomes EXTREMELY IMPORTANT and suddenly it may not be feasible to use a particular hardware encoder.
FWIW, NVIDIA has made significant improvements to quality for their hardware encoders in each of their last 3 generations, and you definitely saw reviewers and creatives talking about that in particular when it came to purchasing decisions.
Apple's encoder is probably quite good at least, but I don't think it's meaningful to consider it for most benchmarks. The scenarios where you both are willing to use the hardware encoder and care about how fast it is are relatively few and far between - if you're just doing a zoom call all that matters is whether it can pump out 60fps and how good it looks, not whether it uses 3% cpu instead of 5%. I'd rather see quality/bitrate comparisons of their encoder with x264, not benchmarks.
x264 and x265 on my M1 Mac mini perform at least as well as my i9 16" MBP with the same settings. Neither are using any of the hardware acceleration available to either CPU. The M1 also does well with FCP which is cool but the software encoding with the above tools is really impressive.
Discounting their existence is entirely unfair, as one of the whole points of Apple Silicon is to give Apple the opportunity to put whatever hardware into their computer that accelerates the use cases they envision for their computers. Dedicated hardware is way more power efficient that software implementations.
However, what happens if you work in a video codec that Apple didn't build in hardware support for? Software video codecs depend heavily on SIMD instructions to be performant.