Video Hardware Acceleration While Watching Videos on Your PC

There are various types of movies that you can play on your PC. They differ in quality and file size but most importantly, they differ in the way they are encoded. A movie player or a codec should be able to decode the movie and play it on your PC. However, there are some movies that need more processing power from your computer. These movies are usually of high quality like DVD/Blueray movies, High definition video files and streaming MPEG-2 HD feeds.

Usually, your processor will be able to decode this video properly however, if you have low system specifications such as 512 MB of RAM or if you still have a single-core processor, video playback may not be as smooth and pretty as you may expect from these high quality videos.

The reason is that aside from playing your video, the processor and your memory may already be busy in maintaining other applications you may have open such as anti-virus software, word processors, internet browsers and other applications. And because your system resources will decline substantially, you'll most likely experience video lag and stuttering. This is where video hardware acceleration comes into play.

When video hardware acceleration is utilized, the video player will use your graphics card processor to assist in decoding the video. This takes a huge load off your CPU and you now have more processing power to play high quality movies. The good thing is that most of the current video cards on the market, from budget to ultra high-end graphics card, support video hardware acceleration.

Nvidia and ATI even have their own decoders to maximize utilization of their video card for movie playback. Aside from alleviating your CPU from stress, video cards can even improve visual quality further by using advanced video processing technology. Check out the links I provided for more information on ATI's Avivo and NVIDIA's Purevideo technologies.

There's a way to verify this. When you're playing a video using pure software (without assistance from your video card) on a windows PC, go to your task manager or press ctrl+alt+delete and check out the performance tab. If you're playing an ultra-high quality video (with a quality of 1080p), CPU usage should be significantly high. If you turn on video hardware acceleration, CPU usage should go down since most of the video processing now goes to your video card processor.

However, this may not always be the case. If you have a video card which is already obsolete in your computer which do not support (or a really old version) video hardware acceleration, it won't do much good in playing high quality movies. Since your card doesn't have enough power, your video will continue to behave the same way (slow and of low-quality). It's probably time to upgrade your system to play 1080p files smoothly.

So there you have it. If you have a movie you want to play and if hardware acceleration is available on your computer, then by all means use it to achieve a much better video playback. Don't forget to consider that since you're borrowing graphics processing power from your video card, it may need more energy from your power supply. It's most likely not that significant though.

Sources:
ATI Avivo and ATI Avivo HD
http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/ati-avivo-hd/Pages/ati-avivo-hd.aspx

NVIDIA Purevideo
http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo.html