How to enable hardware acceleration of a video card

When people buy a computer or laptop with a video card that supports hardware acceleration of the HD video stream, they often face the problem of significant braking when viewing video files that have the MKV extension. To eliminate this annoying flaw, you need to know how to enable hardware acceleration. It will be able to solve your problem once and for all.

This function is present in most modern video adapters, which are equipped with computers and laptops. Let's first figure out how this works, and then I'll talk about how to enable hardware acceleration. This option can shift the process of processing the video stream to the video card from the central processor of the computer. This allows you to reduce the load of the entire system in general. Also, even the time of working in the offline mode is increasing, and it is still possible to play Full HD video, which is not able to be handled by many models of younger dual-core "stones".

Before turning on the hardware acceleration, we need to make sure that the laptop or computer supports this feature. We specify which model of video adapter is installed in the device. This is done by calling the start menu in which you want to run the runtime application and enter the following command: dxdiag. When the DirectX diagnostics window appears, go to the display tab.

Now we need to make sure that the equipment belongs to the corresponding generation. For IT this is a series of HD 2ххх and above, for NVidia it's GForse 8 and higher. As for Intel GMA video devices, this acceleration is not fully supported in them.

So, how to enable hardware acceleration? First you need to install the latest drivers for the video card. They can be found on official websites of manufacturers. After this item is executed, download and install to your computer a special codec, which includes Media Player Classic. This codec is called the K-Lite Mega Codec Pack. When you install this software, you must select an option in the installation window, which is called Lots of Stuff. Once the installation is complete, the computer must be rebooted, and then run the above player and go to the view menu, go to options and select internal filters.

In the opened window, on the right side of it, you must tick the Matroska format, as well as H264 / AVC (DXVA) and VC1 (DXVA). Further in the Playback function section, as well as Output, you need to set the "default systems" for each of them. If in the future you are wondering how to turn off hardware acceleration, do everything in reverse order. Now you can check your actions.

Start the video with the MKV format in the new player, open the Task Manager. Go to the Performance tab and see how much less CPU usage your CPU has taken. Just do not confuse Chrome's hardware acceleration with this action. This is completely different and is the topic of a separate conversation.