Editing Graphics processing unit (section)

===GPU accelerated video decoding and encoding===
[[Image:AMD HD5470 GPU.JPG|thumb|The ATI HD5470 GPU (above, with copper [[heatpipe]] attached) features [[UVD]] 2.1 which enables it to decode AVC and VC-1 video formats.]]
Most GPUs made since 1995 support the [[YUV]] [[color space]] and [[hardware overlay]]s, important for [[digital video]] playback, and many GPUs made since 2000 also support [[MPEG]] primitives such as [[motion compensation]] and [[inverse discrete cosine transform|iDCT]]. This hardware-accelerated video decoding, in which portions of the [[video decoding]] process and [[video post-processing]] are offloaded to the GPU hardware, is commonly referred to as "GPU accelerated video decoding", "GPU assisted video decoding", "GPU hardware accelerated video decoding", or "GPU hardware assisted video decoding".

Recent graphics cards decode [[high-definition video]] on the card, offloading the central processing unit. The most common [[API]]s for GPU accelerated video decoding are [[DirectX Video Acceleration|DxVA]] for [[Microsoft Windows]] operating systems and [[VDPAU]], [[vaAPI|VAAPI]], [[X-Video Motion Compensation|XvMC]], and [[X-Video Bitstream Acceleration|XvBA]] for Linux-based and UNIX-like operating systems. All except XvMC are capable of decoding videos encoded with [[MPEG-1]], [[MPEG-2]], [[MPEG-4 Part 2|MPEG-4 ASP (MPEG-4 Part 2)]], [[MPEG-4 AVC]] (H.264 / DivX 6), [[VC-1]], [[WMV3]]/[[WMV9]], [[Xvid]] / OpenDivX (DivX 4), and [[DivX]] 5 [[codec]]s, while XvMC is only capable of decoding MPEG-1 and MPEG-2.

There are several [[:Category:Video compression and decompression ASIC|dedicated hardware video decoding and encoding solutions]].

====Video decoding processes that can be accelerated====
Video decoding processes that can be accelerated by modern GPU hardware are:
* [[Motion compensation|Motion compensation (mocomp)]]
* [[Inverse discrete cosine transform|Inverse discrete cosine transform (iDCT)]]
** [[Inverse telecine]] 3:2 and 2:2 pull-down correction
* Inverse [[modified discrete cosine transform]] (iMDCT)
* In-loop [[deblocking filter (video)|deblocking filter]]
* Intra-frame prediction
* Inverse [[Quantization (image processing)|quantization]] (IQ)
* [[Huffman coding|Variable-length decoding (VLD)]], more commonly known as slice-level acceleration
* Spatial-temporal [[deinterlacing]] and automatic [[Interlaced video|interlace]]/[[progressive scan|progressive]] source detection
* Bitstream processing ([[Context-adaptive variable-length coding]]/[[Context-adaptive binary arithmetic coding]]) and perfect pixel positioning

These operations also have applications in video editing, encoding, and transcoding.