Top Hardware Accelerated Video Players for Windows
Some video players supporting video decoding and processing can make the video playback more smoothly and keep crisp visual quality. Here are the top 5 hardware accelerated free video players for Windows.
1. VLC Media Player
• User rating: ★★★★★ 4.7/5.0
• Support platforms: Windows 10 and lower
• Hardware Acceleration Support: GPU hardware accelerated decoding (only for Windows)
VLC is a free media player which can play most video/music files and DVD movie.
VLC media player doesn't use hardware accelerated video decoding by default. You can turn it on by yourself, but if you meet problems in video playback with hardware acceleration on, you can also choose to turn it off later.
Open VLC, click Tools > Preferences > Input & Codecs > Tick "Use GPU accelerated decoding" box, to enable hardware acceleration in VLC.
2. 5KPlayer
• User rating: ★★★★★ 4.8/5.0
• Support platforms: Windows 10 and lower
• Hardware Acceleration Support:
Intel QSV
NVIDIA CUDA
DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA)
The most popular hardware accelerated free video player is 5KPlayer. 5KPlayer is a 3-in-1 media player with music/video/DVD playing, airplay, and online video/music downloading functions combined into one. It is capable of playing all media files incl. HEVC/MKV/M2TS/MP4/AVI/WMV/FLV, 720p/1080p/4K/5K/8K UHD videos, HD Camcorder, Blu-ray videos, AAC, AC3, WMA, and FLAC & ALAC, and almost any other video/audio files. Extremely easy-to-use and 100% secure.
Playing large video files like 8K/4K/drone videos will make the computer CPU heavily occupied, but you can enable hardware acceleration decoding to release some burden from CPU to GPU. 5KPlayer can fully Intel QSV, NVIDIA CUDA, DXVA to accelerate 4K H.264, 4K HEVC, 3D, VR video decoding process, etc.
To enable hardware decoder in 5KPlyaer, you can: Open 5KPlayer and right click the main UI of 5KPlayer > Click "Hardware Acceleration" to manually enable HW decoding in 5KPlayer > Click "Allow hardware acceleration" and "Check hardware", to check which one your computer supports and tick it.
3. GOM Player
• User rating: ★★★★☆ 4.3/5.0
• Support platforms: Windows 10 and lower
• Hardware Acceleration Support:
DXVA 2.0
Nvidia CUVID
Intel Quick Sync
Intel HEVC Software Pack
GOM Player is a free media player with built-in support for most popular video formats. It can play AVI, MP4, MKV, FLV, WMV, MOV, and more by default.
The hardware decoders of GOM Player are probably set up differently based on each media file's codec. You can choose either GOM Media Player's internal decoder or a particular hardware decoder for each codec. For instance, when playing a video file with H.264/MPEG2/MPEG4/MPEG1 codec, instead of using internal decoder, you can also select between "Nvidia CUVID Decoder", "Intel QuickSync Decoder", "DXVA 2.0 Decoder" and "DXVA 2.0 Decoder(Copy-back)"; playing a video with HEVC (H.265) codec, you can choose "Intel HEVC Software Pack" hardware decoder; while playing videos with VC-1/DivX/XviD codec, you can choose "Nvidia CUVID Decoder", thus, to accelerate the video processing speed.
4. Windows Media Player 12
• User rating: ★★★★☆ 4.3/5.0
• Support platforms: Windows 10 and lower
• Hardware Acceleration Support:
DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration)
Intel
Nvidia
Windows Media Player is one of the first media players with video acceleration. Microsoft's own DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration) API tech is the only GPU acceleration of video playback in Windows Media Player. Windows Media Player 12 also offers support for GPU acceleration of WMV, H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2 video files.
5. Media Player Classic HomeCinema
• User rating: ★★★★☆ 4.3/5.0
• Support platforms: Windows 10 and lower
• Hardware Acceleration Support:
DXVA (DirectX Video Acceleration)
Intel
Nvidia
Even though MPC-HC is a very basic video/audio player, it implemented GPU acceleration of video when DVXA became available. But the support of GPU acceleration is limited, namely, if you have an Nvidia video card, then only support videos with H.264 codec; if you have an ATI video card, then H.264 and VC-1 are supported. Besides, you also have to make sure that you use certain render settings in the player. Especially for large HD video content, MPC-HC uses DXVA Video Acceleration technology to offload video decoding operations to your modern video card, to enhance the viewing experience.