Hardware overlay

In computing, hardware overlay, a type of video overlay, provides a method of rendering an image to a display screen with a dedicated memory buffer inside computer video hardware. The technique aims to improve the display of a fast-moving video image — such as a computer game, a DVD, or the signal from a TV card. Most video cards manufactured since about 1998 and most media players support hardware overlay.

The overlay is a dedicated buffer into which one app can render (typically video), without incurring the significant performance cost of checking for clipping and overlapping rendering by other apps. The framebuffer has hardware support for importing and rendering the buffer contents without going through the GPU.

The use of a hardware overlay is important for several reasons:

A computer draws on its display by writing a bitmapped representation of the graphics into a special portion of its memory known as video memory. Without any hardware overlays, only one chunk of video memory exists which all applications must share - and the location of a given application's video memory moves whenever the user changes the position of the application's window. With shared video memory, an application must constantly check that it is only writing to memory that belongs to that application.

When running a high-bandwidth video application such as a movie player or some games, the computing power and complexity needed to perform constant clipping and checking negatively impacts performance and compatibility. To escape these limitations, the hardware overlay was invented. In addition, the graphics processing unit (GPU) provides an efficient way to scale the video in size and often performs color-format conversions (such as MPEG-2's YCbCr into RGB).

An application using a hardware overlay gets a completely separate section of video memory that belongs only to that application. Because nothing else uses it, the program never needs to waste resources in checking whether a given piece of the memory belongs to it, nor does it need to monitor whether the user moves the window and changes the location of the video memory. To get the image from the separate video memory to display in tandem with the remaining shared elements on the display, the graphical subsystem associates a certain attribute (for example, a particular color) as a "mask" for that overlay, which the graphics card understands to mean that it is to draw from the separate overlay buffer onto the screen. (This technique has become known as "chroma key".)

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