3 Kinds of Hardware Acceleration You Should Know for Player

Hardware acceleration is mainly used make some functions perform more efficiently than is possible in software running on a general-purpose CPU. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. The implementation of computing tasks in hardware to decrease latency and increase throughput is known as hardware acceleration. 

Hardware acceleration is advantageous for performance and practical when the functions are fixed so updates are not as needed as in software solutions. Today, this post would show you 3 kinds of hardware acceleration for your reference so that you have a better knowledge when it comes to choose a good video player.

1. Intel Quick Sync

Intel Quick Sync Video is Intel's brand for its dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware core. The name "Quick Sync" refers to the use case of quickly transcoding or converting a video from, for example, a DVD or Blu-ray Disc to a format appropriate to, for example, a smartphone. This becomes critically important in the professional video workplace, in which source material may have been shot in any number of video formats, all of which must be brought into a common format (commonly H.264) for inter-cutting. Quick Sync is a dedicated hardware core on the processor die. This allows for much more power efficient video processing.

Quick Sync has been praised for being very fast. A benchmark from Tom’s Hardware showed that it could encode a 449 MB, four minute 1080p file to 1024×768 in 22 seconds. The same encoding using only software took 172 seconds. The same encoding took 83 or 86 seconds GPU-assisted, using a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 and an AMD Radeon HD 6870 respectively, both of which are contemporary high end GPUs.

Quick Sync, like other hardware accelerated video encoding technologies, gives lower quality results than with CPU only encoders. Speed is prioritized over quality.

2. NVIDIA CUDA Technology

The CUDA platform is designed to work with programming languages such as C, C++, and Fortran. NVIDIA GPUs power millions of desktops, notebooks, workstations and supercomputers around the world, accelerating computationally-intensive tasks. By processing video conversions on NVIDIA’s GPU instead of your computer’s CPU, more CPU resources can be spared for other applications, making your computer run 6 times faster. This accessibility makes it easier for specialists in parallel programming to use GPU resources. NVIDIA CUDA technology can offer improved video encoding/decoding performance (when processing high-definition videos in particular) for any computer running on CUDA-enabled GPU. By processing video conversions on NVIDIA’s GPU instead of your computer’s CPU, more CPU resources can be spared for other applications, making your computer run much faster.

3. AMD APP acceleration

AMD APP technology is a set of advanced hardware and software technologies that enable AMD graphics processing cores (GPU), working in concert with the system’s x86 cores (CPU), to execute heterogeneously to accelerate many applications beyond just graphics. This enables better balanced platforms capable of running demanding computing tasks faster than ever, and sets software developers on the path to optimize for AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs).

Groundbreaking AMD App Acceleration helps you:

·         Enjoy beautifully rich and clear video playback when streaming from the web

·         Take in your favorite movies in stunning, stutter-free HD quality

·         Run multiple applications smoothly at maximum speed

·         Enjoy lightning fast game play and realistic physics effects

Words in the end

From the introduction mentioned above, you can see that hardware acceleration can improve speed and quality a lot no matter when you are playing videos or changing video formats. Some products such as Leawo Blu-ray Ripper and Leawo Blu-ray Copy are equipped with such kinds of hardware acceleration technology. If you are interested in this kind of media technology and would like to have a try, you can go to Leawo website and download Prof. Media to get the experience of hardware acceleration technology.