NVDEC (formerly known as NVCUVID) is a feature in Nvidia graphics cards that performs video decoding, offloading this compute-intensive task from the CPU. NVDEC is a successor of PureVideo and is available in Kepler and later Nvidia GPUs.
It is accompanied by NVENC for video encoding in Nvidia's Video Codec SDK.
NVDEC can offload video decoding to full fixed-function decoding hardware (Nvidia PureVideo), or (partially) decode via CUDA software running on the GPU, if fixed-function hardware is not available.
Depending on the GPU architecture, the following codecs are supported:
NVCUVID was originally distributed as part of the Nvidia CUDA Toolkit. Later, it was renamed to NVDEC and moved to the Nvidia Video Codec SDK.
NVDEC is available for Windows and Linux operating systems. As NVDEC is a proprietary API (as opposed to the open-source VDPAU API), it is only supported by the proprietary Nvidia driver on Linux.
Hardware accelerated decode and encode are supported on Nvidia GeForce, Quadro, Tesla, and GRID products with Fermi or newer generation GPUs.