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Video Accelerator Windows 7/10 for Hardware Decoding Videos

Posted by Kaylee Wood | Last update: April 28, 2020

Are your 4K UHD HDR HEVC H.264 etc videos getting stuck especially when played on low-powered computer? Hope to eliminate the annoying buffering and make your high-res videos stream faster and smoother? This guide tells why high-res video playback gets choke and introduces best video accelerator Windows 7/10 to help speed up your high definition videos playback.

Why Is There Hiccup of High-res Video Playback?

To decode and render a video, the default technique is software decoding that use CPU only. CPU is often busy with limited energy to handle multiple tasks so that it can’t 100% concentrate on the heavy high-res video decoding and rendering. That’s why skipping frames, mosaics and freezing screens occur when playing 8K 4K HDR HEVC H.264 etc videos especially on lower-end computers. Therefore, video accelerator for Windows 7/10 is created.

What is Video Accelerator? Or What Is the Benefit of Video Accelerator?

In short, video accelerator is a way to help quicken the decoding and rendering process during 8K 4K UHD HDR HEVC H.264 playback. More specifically, video accelerator is the key created to activate hardware acceleration, aka GPU acceleration of your computer to help decode and render high resolution videos in a faster and more fluent manner. By allocating the heavy decoding job from CPU to GPU, CPU consumption drops sharply and more tasks on computer can be completed as well.

According to a survey about Hardware Acceleration vs Software Decoding , the unable-to-play 4K HDR contents on low-end computer can be played with the help of a video accelerator. While on the computer with better configuration, hardware acceleration helps drop the occupancy of CPU when playing 4K HDR HEVC AVC videos and ease CPU to finish more tasks, and also quicken the GPU rendering without sacrificing the image quality.

What Types of Video Accelerators Are Out There?

Video accelerators for hardware acceleration are diverse in types or features, but one ability they should own is to turn on hardware (GPU) acceleration. To choose the best video accelerator for Windows 7/10, you’d better first know something about hardware acceleration methods.

DXVA: DXVA is the abbreviation for DirectX Video Acceleration. It is a standard specified by Microsoft for speeding up high definition videos by utilizing the graphic card to reduce CPU usage. DXVA 1.0 can help decode MPEG2 and WMV, and DXVA 2.0 added H.264/VC-1 decoding ability. Now it is the most common hardware acceleration method that most video accelerator can activate.

Intel Quick Sync: Intel Quick Sync Video is one of the built-in features of the fourth generation Intel Core Processor. It uses Intel HD Graphics to perform decoding and encoding. This video acceleration way is also praised for its fast speed for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, VC-1, VP8/9 and H.265/HEVC.

Nvidia CUVID: Nvidia CUVID is a decoder carried by NVIDIA graphics card, can be called as CUDA decoding as well. Nvidia CUDA is the predecessor of Nvidia NVENC and now has been replaced by NVENC. When your video accelerator turns on this mode, HD videos like H.264 could be decoded without occupying much CPU.

AMD: With AMD graphics cards, you are allowed to utilize the graphics processing power to process highly-compressed videos like playing, streaming or converting. By activating the GPU, it helps leave your CPU free for other tasks on computer.

When your computer is equipped with certain chip for GPU acceleration and has installed a corresponding video accelerator, you can enable CPU and GPU to process video decoding and rendering together smoothly to even play HEVC Windows 10 . Video accelerator comes in three main variants including accelerator for high-res video playback, video download and video conversion, and here we are mainly talking about video accelerator for 4K UHD HDR H.264 etc video playback.

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Video Accelerator Software to Speed up 4K HDR H.264 HEVC Playback

Video accelerator software 5KPlayer is a powerful hardware-accelerated video player that can make full use of GPU acceleration to avoid frame skipping or interruptions when playing 4K HDR HD high definition videos, and at the same time reduce CPU usage to complete more tasks.

Video accelerator 5KPlayer now has the competence to activate Intel QSV, NVIDIA CUDA, DXVA 2.0 and AMD hardware acceleration modes to help decode and render videos smoothly without sacrificing the image quality. Besides, this 4K UHD video player can play any video without choke on high-end computer and plays high-res videos on lower-equipped computer with its built-in hardware acceleration mode.

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