The pipeline allows certain CPU-intensive operations such as iDCT, motion compensation and deinterlacing to be offloaded to the GPU.
The pipeline starts at the CPU which is used for parsing the media stream and conversion to DXVA-compatible structures.
If the graphic driver does not implement one or more of the interfaces, it is up to the codec to provide a software fallback for it.
DXVA specifies the Motion Compensation DDI, which specifies the interfaces for iDCT operations, Huffman coding, motion compensation, alpha blending, inverse quantization, color space conversion and frame-rate conversion operations, among others.
The DDIs it shares with DXVA 1.0 are also enhanced with the ability to use hardware acceleration of more operations.
With native implementation, the decoded video stays in GPU memory until it has been displayed.
This implementation doesn't have the limitations mentioned above and acts similarly to a normal software decoder; however, video stuttering will occur if the GPU is not fast enough to copy its memory back to the CPU's memory.
Native mode is advantageous unless there is a need for customized processing, as the additional copy-back operations will increase GPU memory load.