Hardware-accelerated HEVC encoding is now widely available across modern consumer devices, yet the performance and compression efficiency of these implementations vary significantly across architectures. This work presents a comprehensive evaluation of three representative hardware encoders, a desktop GPU, a laptop CPU, and a mobile SoC, together with a widely used software encoder, x265. All results are compared against the HEVC Test Model (HM) reference encoder under the Common Test Conditions, using 26 test sequences spanning Classes A1 through F. The analysis examines real-time encoding capability, bitrate efficiency through BD-BR, and the impact of resolution, frame rate, and content type on encoder behavior. The results highlight clear trade-offs between throughput and compression efficiency across architectures: desktop GPUs achieve the highest speed, mobile SoCs prioritize power-efficient operation at the cost of BD-BR, and software encoding remains competitive only at lower resolutions. These findings provide a practical benchmark for researchers and developers working on video-coding algorithms and hardware architectures, enabling direct comparison against the performance characteristics of widely deployed HEVC encoders.