Your i7 should handle everything standing on its head provided you have Quick Sync running properly, are recording Direct to Disk and are using sub-streams to your advantage.

Analysis of the process breakdown could be accomplished with the appropriate tools, but is well beyond my pay grade and shouldn't be anything but a curiosity once you get your basic encoding sorted out.

Break it all down to the basics first. Direct-to-Disk. Intel Hardware Acceleration. Sub-Streams. You should be averaging below 15% max - providing you don't have a ton of other stuff running on the same machine eating up resources.

I note that Pogo did mention it in the previous post.

Personally, I set up sub-streams before they were automated, right when they first became a thing. That was the era when people asked "Why does Blue Iris need such a powerful cpu when other solutions don't.".

So I did have to search the web to find individual solutions for each camera type, and it halved my cpu load. I guess due to that I always keep an eye on the dual stream fps and health.

My next experiment was to see if the Intel cpu acceleration was still required (i7-8700k). I turned it off and cpu load didn't alter. I leave that now for CPAI if it can use it