Efficient video decoding on GPUs by point based rendering

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.