as some of you may be aware intel's new haswell cpu's added hardware support for a bunch of h264 features that previous generations didn't support. today i hit up handbrake's forums to see if they were working on adding x265 support to handbrake when i ran across this thread:

https://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=27433&start=25

there's some interesting stuff in that thread as it related to QS on haswell and handbrake support but what caught my eye was this:

https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/QuickSyncOptions

also, check out this x264 vs haswell QS comparison done using a modified SSIM as a metric:

http://www.missingremote.com/review/intel-quick-sync-examining-haswell-performance