Hardware overlay

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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.^[1]

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.^{[citation needed]}