Efficient Video Decoding on GPUs by Point Based Rendering

Abstract

To accelerate computation intensive video decoding tasks, we present a novel framework to offload most decoding operations to current GPUs. Our method is based on rendering graphics points and suitable for block-based video standards. By representing video blocks as graphics points, we achieve great flexibility and high parallelism to utilize the GPU s pipelined stream processing architecture. The computational resources within texture units and blending units are also exploited to facilitate computations. We propose a high performance implementation of IDCT on GPUs, which efficiently excludes most zero-value coefficients to save the bandwidth and the computations. Compared with the existing quad-based representation, our point based implementation of MC greatly reduces data transfer and redundancy. We have demonstrated the efficiency of our proposed framework by a MPEG-2 decoder. Our results indicate a significant improvement over prior CPU and GPU solutions.