Is rendering on OSX GPU accelerated?

No, VideoToolbox is a macOS framework that provides an abstraction over different hardware.

What about Windows nvenc for OSX?

NVIDIA says NVENC is for Windows and Linux only, and Apple and NVIDIA had a falling out. I do not know the state of it. Handbrake’s page seems to confirm this.

I am pretty sure it went thru h264videotoolbox

Maybe there is some software fallback in macOS.