NVidia - DXVA vs Software

Livin · 2012-07-03 23:03

Is there a picture quality (PQ) difference between using Software rendering vs DXVA rendering? I use a lot of 720p, and 480p material.

Reason I ask...

There is a bug with NVidia where antialiasing + DXVA rendering causes a problem.

So the options to make XBMC video display properly are...

a) Don't Use DXVA: In XBMC use True Fullscreen, turn off DXVA rendering / hardware acceleration and use Software rendering
b) Use DXVA: turn off Antialiasing in NVidia Control Panel

... thus, I'm curious if there is a difference in the renders that would show a PQ difference?

**Ned Scott** · 2012-07-05 02:29

Since software decoding can be updated via software, and can also be more tolerant of encoding errors and non-standard settings, software/CPU decoding can often give the best picture quality.

If your computer's CPU can handle it, and it doesn't make your CPU fans loud or anything like that, then you might as well just use software decoding.

Livin · 2012-07-05 05:49

So I tried it... Software gave me some serious frame drops but on the same movie, switching to DXVA - zero drops. My CPU is an i7 and GPU is Quadro 800m. There is more than enough power to do software... odd!

I moved back to DXVA and just use Full Screen Window and it is fine... I sure hope they fix the bug with True Full Screen & Nvidia.