Hardware Acceleration

Hardware acceleration uses dedicated hardware to accelerate a task so that it runs faster and/or more efficiently than on the CPU alone. Most commonly, this involves offloading processing to the graphics processing unit (GPU), digital signal processor (DSP), or some other hardware block that’s specialized on a specific task.

One of the most common use cases for hardware acceleration is video encoding and decoding. For example, rather than decoding a video stream on the CPU, which isn’t very efficient, graphics cards or other hardware often contains dedicated video encode/decode blocks that can do the task much more efficiently. Likewise, decompressing an audio file can often be done faster on a DSP or sound card than on the CPU.

Another very common use for hardware acceleration is 2D graphics acceleration. User interfaces, for example, often feature lots of graphics, text, and animations to render.