The tuning goes to NVIDIA first: it is the decoder that gets measured, the upscaler that gets integrated, the path that gets a number. This page is the other half of that sentence, written down so it is a commitment rather than an intention. First is not only. A Windows machine with Intel graphics is an ordinary laptop, and an application that fails on one has not shipped, it has narrowed.
Three things hold on a machine with no NVIDIA card at all. They are not aspirations: a change that breaks one of them is a regression whether or not anything else improved.
| Must keep working | How it is decided |
|---|---|
| Hardware decode | d3d11va, chosen from what the runtime can actually open rather than from what the vendor is. CUDA is preferred only when the window reports an NVIDIA card and the decoder is available; otherwise the choice falls to Vulkan and then to d3d11va. |
| A vendor-neutral renderer | Vulkan is the default and OpenGL is the fallback when Vulkan does not initialise. Neither is an NVIDIA path, and the fallback is taken on the driver's answer rather than on the name of the card. |
| An SDR present that loads nothing | Nothing on the present path asks for an NVIDIA library. The vendor features that would are asked for only where they are available, and never on the path a machine without them takes. |
Nothing, except that the option is not offered. A machine without CUDA does not see CUDA in the decoder list, because the list is built from what the runtime reports and what it can open. There is no error, no warning and no degraded mode to explain.
That rule binds every vendor feature: the absence path is the quiet one. A dialog saying that an NVIDIA card would be better is a requirement with a friendly voice.
Worth saying plainly, because a table always reads stronger than it is. All three hardware decode paths were measured rather than only the NVIDIA one, and paced at 60fps the CUDA path came last of the three. Every one of those runs was taken on the same machine, an RTX 4060, which is named in each recorded result. So the floor above is held by design and by review, and the numbers beside it describe one card.