AVC/H.264 Decoder with DXVA support

The company has succeeded in developing H.264 video decoder based on NVIDIA technologies. Our Decoder will allow a great part of our community to enjoy the advantages of high quality HD home theater experience on their desktop PCs.

A glimpse of H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 Advanced Video Coding

H.264, also known as MPEG-4 Path 10 or AVC, is a digital video codec standard ratified for the High Definition DVD (HD-DVD) and Blu-Ray specifications - the two new high definition DVD content standards. Based on advanced coding techniques H.264 is able to provide the same video quality as MPEG-2 at bit rates that are two or three times lower, and this is the feature that makes H.264 particularly noteworthy.

H.264 Decoder performance

H.264 video decoding is a processor-intensive task demanding high PC performance. However, dividing video decoding operations between the host CPU and the graphics hardware accelerator (GPU) allows both streamlining the decoding task and sparing the CPU usage (decreasing the processor loading). Especially that GPU resources are usually not 100% utilized.

H.264 hardware acceleration

While MPEG-1, MPEG-2 hardware acceleration on GPUs has been in use for a long time already, till now there has not been one for H.264. The new NVIDIA PureVideo technology can provide playback of H.264 both SD and HD video. This technology allows performing such decompression tasks as motion compensation, intra prediction and post processing. The following graphics cards can support hardware assisted H.264 playback:

• GeForce 7900 Series
• GeForce 7800 Series
• GeForce 7600
• GeForce 7300 Series
• GeForce 6600 Series
• GeForce 6500

Hardware acceleration for ATI graphic adapters is implemented. All ATI graphic adapters series X support H.264 hardware acceleration

Currently the company implements in the decoder DXVA 2.0 API support. This API is designed to be universal for all devices supporting MPEG-1/2, H.264, VC-1 hardware decoding. It is available for Windows Vista users.

Today and Tomorrow

The recently released Avivo technology (ATI) serves to facilitate the hardware-assisted H.264 decoding using ATI chipsets. Nowadays our best efforts are hurled to perform this task.

Performance test results (for NVIDIA)