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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jameson_uk" data-source="post: 611590" data-attributes="member: 11220">It is not as easy as that.....Given the right circumstances your graphics card will handle decoding the video.   This needs the right combination of video type, codecs, renderers and hardware.  You don't really need to understand the differences but DXVA is a generic term for acceleration via DirectX in windows where as AVIVO is general name for some ATI technology (some of which makes use of DXVA) and CUDA is NVidia technology but actually has the ability to offload itself (different to DXVA).Hardware is fairly simple with any card released in the last year or so.  Something like an ATI 5450 is good for this (and cheap).  Any Nvidia GT card will do it (and many early ones) as well as ATI 4xxx cards but the 5xxx cards are much better and cost the same.Renderer is easy as in MP you will generally be using VMR9 for XP and EVR for Vista / Win7.Codecs and files are a little more complicated; you are correct in thinking that most HD content is H264.  This is however slightly clouded in that H264 comes at different level.   Bluray is level 4.1 and many codecs around only supported hardware acceleration up to this level.   Some bright souls however have encoded their videos at higher levels than this as higher must be better right <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite2" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=";)" />   This means no matter what you do with these files using standard codecs you will not get hardware acceleration.  In these circumstances all the decoding will be done on the CPU and it makes no difference what graphics card is installed.So a lot depends on what H264 decoder you use.  I use the codec from PowerDVD 7.3 Ultra (In recent updates Cyberlink have stopped you using their codecs outside of PowerDVD though) and this uses DXVA and works well on standard compliant material.  CoreAVC is a little different in that until recently it was all CPU based and would not offload anything.   Recently they have added CUDA support which means on recent(ish) NVidia cards the video can be offloaded (if paired with current drivers).  (The CoreAVC website should list which cards / drivers are supported).FFDShow has recently released as beta version of a DXVA H264 decoder but I have no experience on whether this will offload all video or whether this is still limited to standard compliant video.  Also I have found this a little flaky (it is after all a very early beta)Other than that I am not sure what H264 codecs are currently working.So if you are in control of what video you have (so are not downloading stuff from the internet) then you are fine with an ATI 5450 as long as you encode the video to level 4.1 or less (or leave the video as is from an original source).</blockquote>

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