With the beta earlier this month Shotcut rolled out new hardware decoder options and now it's officially shipping. Shotcut is using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) on Linux, Microsoft's Media Foundation on Windows, and Video Toolbox on Apple macOS. This hardware decoding for preview scaling is being enabled by default with the noted exception of NVIDIA GPUs on Linux. The codec support also varies depending upon your hardware.
While making use of hardware decoding, the performance speed-up is mostly pronounced if using linear 10-bit CPU processing or are editing on a low-powered CPU.
Shotcut 26.1 also has hardware decoder support for video exporting but that is disabled by default in the 26.1 release since it can sometimes increase export times.
Shotcut 26.1 binaries and source code are available from GitHub . More details on the new release via Shotcut.org .