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.

Prior to DXVA, each display adapter company had their own unique and proprietary interface for accessing these hardware capabilities to the decoder. Some of the following graphics chips supports DXVA:

• Nvidia DXVA capable hardware - All GeForce, GeForce 2, GeForce2GO, and GeForce3 level graphics chips support DXVA with HWMC (Hardware Motion Compensation) for video acceleration and hardware DVD sub-picture blending.


• ATI DXVA capable hardware - All Rage 128, Rage Mobility, Mobility 128, Radeon and Mobile Radeon level graphics chips support DXVA with IDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transformation) for video acceleration and hardware DVD sub-picture blending.


• Intel DXVA capable hardware - All i810 and i815 level graphics chips support DXVA with HWMC for video acceleration and hardware DVD sub-picture blending.


• PowerVR DXVA capable hardware - KyroII level graphics chips support DXVA with HWMC but have no support for hardware DVD sub-picture blending.

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