Custom router (VyOS or pfsense) - offloading?

Hi there, I’m currently running an ERX router and am thinking about setting up a custom router (would be a VM on my unraid server). There’s one thing I don’t get yet. The ERX benefits from offloading, especially hwnat. But what about a custom router (VyOS or pfsense), would it also use some kind of hardware acceleration and which hardware would I have to use? If its not using any kind of offloading I would probably need a lot more cpu power than the ERX to get the same results? Probably needless to say, I’m pretty much at the beginning of understanding all this router stuff...