When you watch movies online over Netflix, Amazon Prime or Hulu, the video stream that is being downloaded must be decoded first before you can enjoy it in your web browser or app. Before Windows 7, all of this decoding was done using software codecs. In order to make the most of your powerful graphics card (GPU), Microsoft introduced DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) in Windows 7 and it continues to be present in all versions of Windows thereafter. DXVA can harness the power of your GPU in real-time when you are decoding a video stream. Using the DXVA technology, your operating system and applications can make use of both the software based decoding and hardware accelerated decoding to give you the best performance.
How will you find out whether your system supports DXVA and if it does which features of DXVA are supported? You can find out all of this information using the DXVA Checker tool. This tool is available in two editions – with installer and without installer (portable). The portable version is more than enough and does everything that the installer version does.
Upon launching the DXVA Checker, you will see a lot of technical data like a big list of decoder devices and their capabilities – whether they support DXVA1 or DXVA2, which version of DirectX is supported and so on. Basically if you have one GPU then it will show just one device, if you have two GPU and then it will show two decoder devices and so on. It also shows processor device and its features related to DXVA.
Apart from these, you can also see the DirectShow and Media Foundation (DS/MF) decoders. You can view a log of various events associated with the GPU and how it responds to the DXVA related calls.
You can download DXVA Checker tool from http://bluesky23.yukishigure.com/en/DXVAChecker.html.