Ah I see. It might not be a requirement though. In the case that the numbers are given with hardware offloaded compression it might just be slower when running on CPU. But I guess time will tell.

There is no mention of any extra hardware here though. The article even suggests this to benefit existing hardware like the steam deck.

So using the back of a knife to cut something is not more efficient than using the sharp side? I would say making better use of hardware is also an efficiency gain. You use the same hardware to do more, while not driving up cost significantly. That is efficiency in my book.