DirectX Video Acceleration

DirectX Video Acceleration (DxVA) is a standardized group of MPEG2 decoding video routines that are used in modern graphics processor video engines. This allows modern video cards to accelerate the most CPU intensive parts of the MPEG2 decoding process, leaving the lesser parts of the decoding pipeline to the CPU. This can also simply be called Hardware Acceleration.

For HDTV using DxVA acceleration becomes critical as pure software decoding of HDTV streams requires a 3Ghz processor while only a ~2Ghz processor is needed with a DxVA compliant video card. Video cards that are DxVA compliant include the ATI Radeon family, the NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX and GeForce FX family.