Yeah at this time intel was just releasing their quick sync tech and a few vendors were putting 4 intel cpus on a pcie board and using it for video encoding! Matrox also had a considerable piece of this business doing video compression and editing/compositing using bespoke processors and boards.

Despite being more "power efficient" - both nvidia and intel's hardware solutions left a lot to be desired in terms of final quality for the same bitrate, compared to x264 that seemed to just put out substantially better quality video for the same bitrate even at the same h264 profile levels. There are still lots of x264 design elements, some even verbatim ported, into modern av1 and hevc encoders.