What is Hardware Acceleration in video transcoding?转码视频时的硬件加速指什么？

The start of the thing is: I found an option in Permute 3 on macOS when I want to transcode videos(with mkv format) to H.264(AVC, advanced video code) or H.265(HEVC, High Efficiency Video Coding).
ps. In fact that video file is already at HEVC coding. [UPDATE: Just extracting will be okay if you want to get a same coding.]

But I was confused about it. Then went to do some research. Conclusions are as follows.

GPU, graphics processing unit
CPU, central processing unit
Hardware acceleration (or GPU rendering), refers to the process by which an application will offload certain computing tasks onto specialized hardware components within the system, enabling greater efficiency than is possible in software running on a general-purpose CPU alone.

Check it at Hardware Acceleration Definition

Notice that in the definition, “Hardware acceleration … brings greater efficiency”, but let alone quality. So if you think much of the quality, disable it. If you want your computer run smoothly, enable it to relax the CPU.

Namely, we either only use CPU to transcode or compress videos or let CPU and GPU work together. With CPU itself, resulting files will be more stable, size being smaller. Disadvantages are, when transcoding videos, your computer will be slow because transcoding use most of it. [UPDATE: After test, I only want to say, the waiting time is so-so-so long, about 5~20 times slower than enabling hardware acceleration.] If you don’t care about time consuming, I think just disabling the hardware acceleration and putting your computer alone to wait for the output should be a greater choice.