Upcoming Maxwell GPUs Will Support H.265, But VP9 Is Uncertain

Written by Michael Larabel in NVIDIA on 9 May 2014 at 10:45 AM EDT. 25 Comments
NVIDIA
NVIDIA launched their GeForce GTX 750 graphics cards back in February as their first products based upon their new Maxwell architecture. Sadly those GPUs didn't support any H.265 or VP9 acceleration, but at least it looks like the former will be supported by the next round of Maxwell GPUs.

While it doesn't come to great surprise, the second-generation Maxwell GPUs are reported to support the H.265 codec. H.265 / HEVC support isn't too shocking and was widely expected, while Fudzilla is now reporting it as indeed fact.

High Efficiency Video Coding (H.265) is the successor to H.264 and has double the compression ratio of its predecessor while having the same level of video quality. HEVC H.265 supports up to an 8K UHD resolution.

While H.265 encoding support is confirmed for these 20nm Maxwell GPUs later this calendar year, the VP9 video format support hasn't yet been officially acknowledged. We're hopeful though to see Google's open-source VP9 support out of the upcoming Maxwell GPUs.

Under Linux the video decode acceleration support of the NVIDIA graphics hardware continues to be exploited out of VDPAU (the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) that continues to be widely adopted by both open and closed-source multimedia applications on Linux.
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