1. A method for vector processing based quantization acceleration for an encoding process, comprising: computing coefficients for a discrete cosine transform encoding operation; determining a quantization step for use with a quantization operation for each of the coefficients; out of a range of possible quantized output values, computing a set of quantized output values from the coefficients by using a vector processor configured to evaluate each of the quantized output values of the set in parallel and transmitting the resulting quantized output values to the encoding process; for the range of possible quantized output values that are not computed using the vector processor, computing the quantized output values from the coefficients by executing multiplication logic and transmitting the resulting quantized output values to the encoding process.