A method for comparator based quantization acceleration for an encoding process. The method includes computing coefficients for a discrete cosine transform encoding operation and determining a quantization step for use with a quantization operation for each of the coefficients. The method further includes determining each of the coefficients that are less than or equal to one half the quantization step by using a comparator configured in accordance with the quantization step. For the coefficients that are less than or equal to one half the quantization step, a quantized output value is transmitted to the encoding process. For the coefficients that are greater than one half the quantization step, the quantized output value is determined by executing multiplication logic to compute the quantized output value and transmit the computed quantized output value to the encoding process.