What is DXVA?

Microsoft® DirectX® Video Acceleration (DirectX VA). Read more about DXVA on the MSDN on-line.

DirectX® VA allows the performance of some video processing operations on a hardware accelerator instead of the main CPU thus reducing the CPU usage. Allowing the accelerator to perform less complex video processing operations we ensure the video decoding acceleration to be accomplished for various video standards with minimal customization to the accelerator. Less frequently executed and more complex video processing operations, such as bitstream parsing and variable-length decoding (VLD), can be performed on the host CPU.

DirectX® Video Acceleration permits one or more stages of the video decoding process to be divided between the host CPU and the video hardware accelerator. The accelerator executes the motion-compensated prediction (MCP), and may also execute the inverse discrete-cosine transform (IDCT) and the variable-length decoding (VLD) stages of the decoding process. These modes execution depends on the type of Chipset or VGA card implementation.

The following chips support DXVA with IDCT or VLD for video acceleration and hardware DVD sub-picture blending:

• NVIDIA DXVA capable hardware: GeForce (GTX 2xx, 9xxx, 8xxx, 6xxx, 5 FX, 4 MX series), GeForce 2, GeForce2GO, and GeForce3 level graphics chips
• ATI DXVA capable hardware: ATi Radeon HD (2xxx, 3xxx, 4xxx, Xxxx, 9xxx, 8500, 7xxx series) All Rage 128, Rage Mobility, Mobility 128, Mobile Radeon level graphics chips
• Intel DXVA capable hardware: Intel integrated chips (G45, 965 and possibly many others). All i810 and i815 level graphics chips

Other DXVA capable hardware - DXVA is also supported with certain chips from Trident and SIS. Check with your display card manufacturer to find out for sure if your specific hardware supports DXVA with updated drivers

Read more about: