Nvidia NVDEC (formerly known as NVCUVID
) is a feature in its graphics cards that performs
video decoding
A video decoder is an electronic circuit, often contained within a single integrated circuit chip, that converts base-band analog video signals to digital video. Video decoders commonly allow programmable control over video characteristics such ...
, offloading this compute-intensive task from the
CPU.
It is accompanied by
NVENC for video ''encoding'' in Nvidia's Video Codec SDK.
Technology
NVDEC can offload video decoding to full fixed-function decoding hardware (
Nvidia PureVideo
PureVideo is Nvidia's hardware SIP core that performs video decoding. PureVideo is integrated into some of the Nvidia GPUs, and it supports hardware decoding of multiple video codec standards: MPEG-2, VC-1, H.264, HEVC, and AV1. PureVideo occ ...
), or (partially) decode via
CUDA
CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ca ...
software running on the GPU, if fixed-function hardware is not available.
Depending on the GPU architecture, the following codecs are supported:
*
MPEG-2
MPEG-2 (a.k.a. H.222/H.262 as was defined by the ITU) is a standard for "the generic video coding format, coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of Lossy compression, lossy video compression and ...
*
VC-1
SMPTE 421, informally known as VC-1, is a video coding format. Most of it was initially developed as Microsoft's proprietary video format Windows Media Video 9 in 2003. With some enhancements including the development of a new Advanced Profile, ...
*
H.264
Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distr ...
(AVC)
*
H.265
H is the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet.
H may also refer to:
Musical symbols
* H number, Harry Halbreich reference mechanism for music by Honegger and Martinů
* H, B (musical note)
* H, B major
People
* H. (noble) (died after 12 ...
(HEVC)
*
VP8
VP8 is an open and royalty-free video compression format released by On2 Technologies in 2008.
Initially released as a proprietary successor to On2's previous VP7 format, VP8 was released as an open and royalty-free format in May 2010 after Goo ...
*
VP9
VP9 is an open and royalty-free video coding format developed by Google.
VP9 is the successor to VP8 and competes mainly with MPEG's High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265).
At first, VP9 was mainly used on Google's video platform YouTube. ...
*
AV1
AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 th ...
Versions
NVCUVID was originally distributed as part of the Nvidia CUDA Toolkit.
Later, it was renamed to NVDEC and moved to the Nvidia Video Codec SDK.
Operating system support
NVDEC is available for Windows and Linux operating systems.
As NVDEC is a