[3] The VDPAU interface is to be implemented by device drivers, such as the Nvidia GeForce driver, nouveau, or amdgpu, to offer end-user software, such as VLC media player or GStreamer, a standardized access to available video decompression acceleration hardware in the form of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) blocks on graphics processing units (GPU), such as Nvidia's PureVideo or AMD's Unified Video Decoder and make use of it.
[7] Currently, the portions capable of being offloaded by VDPAU onto the GPU are motion compensation (mo comp), inverse discrete cosine transform (iDCT), VLD (variable-length decoding) and deblocking for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP (MPEG-4 Part 2), H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1, WMV3/WMV9 encoded videos.
VDPAU was originally designed by Nvidia for their PureVideo SIP block present on their GeForce 8 series and later GPUs.
[9] VDPAU is implemented in X11 software device drivers, but relies on acceleration features in the hardware GPU.
[11] ATI/AMD released an open source driver for Radeon HD 4000+ graphic cards featuring VDPAU acceleration.
As of late 2013, there is an independently developed back-end driver that in turn uses OpenGL (for drawing and scaling), and VA-API if available (for decoding).