Modern graphics cards have hardware video scalers, for example as part of AMD Avivo, NVIDIA PureVideo or Intel ClearVideo. For example, AMD\'s Avivo whitepaper says:
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Some of the possible approaches are:
Use MFCreateVideoRenderer to create an EVR media sink, and call IMFVideoDisplayControl::SetRenderingPrefs with MFVideoRenderPrefs_AllowScaling flag set (or use IMFAttributes and set the EVRConfig_AllowScaling attribute) and then call IMFVideoDisplayControl::SetVideoPosition to define how the result is scaled. This is part of the Enhanced Video Renderer (EVR).
Use IDirectXVideoProcessor::VideoProcessBlt and set DXVA2_VideoProcessBltParams::ConstrictionSize to define how the result is scaled. This is also based on EVR/DXVA.
(suggested by ananthonline) Use Video Resizer DSP and use IWMResizerProps::SetFullCropRegion (or MFPKEY_RESIZE_DST_WIDTH and MFPKEY_RESIZE_DST_HEIGHT) to scale the result. This is both a DirectX Media Object (DMO) and Media Foundation Transform (MFT). Note: A video MFT has the attribute MF_SA_D3D_AWARE which can be used to query whether it supports DirectX 3D hardware acceleration, and this can be enabled by sending it the MFT_MESSAGE_SET_D3D_MANAGER message.
Use Video Processor MFT and set IMFVideoProcessorControl::SetConstrictionSize to scale the result. This is a MFT.
Use a DirectX 3D device and call StretchRect to scale a surface. Note: this pretty obviously does not use the video scaler hardware, it uses texture sampler hardware. A texture can be rendered on a quad with similar effect.
I am still not sure which, if any, of these approaches uses the video scaler hardware. It is likely that at least approaches 1 and 2 would, because they are tied directly to EVR/DXVA; approaches 3 and 4 also might if they are accelerated by DXVA. A definitive answer is still needed, ideally with a reference to documentation and/or a code sample.