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I seem to remember that some GPU acceleration under Linux was disabled voluntarily, on both Firefox and Chrome, because they actually ran much slower than CPU,
by Yoric 7y ago
I seem to remember that some GPU acceleration under Linux was disabled voluntarily, on both Firefox and Chrome, because they actually ran much slower than CPU, probably due to bad drivers.
- ubercow13 7y agoThat’s certain GPU acceleration of rendering - specifically for Firefox I think compositing is disabled by default. It’s not the same as GPU accelerated video decoding which isn’t implemented in either browser, except via a set of patches for Chromium.
- vetinari 7y agoIt is slower not due to drivers, but due to how the browsers[1] compose the final webpage. It does that using CPU, not GPU as on other operating systems, so hardware video decoding would involve moving the compressed video to GPU, waiting for it to decode, moving the decoded video back to RAM, do the composition, and then move the result back to GPU for display. For hw decoding to have sense, GPU composition is needed. Hopefully webrender will bring that in for Linux too. [1] Firefox actually, Chrome does use GPU composition. Chrome for ChromeOS even uses the same driver (libva+intel-vaapi-driver) as desktop linux for video decoding, Google just is not willing to support it on desktop. That's what some distributions enable in their Chromium builds.
- floatboth 7y agoGPU layer composition was available in Firefox for ages, long before WebRender. It just was not enabled on Linux by default due to fear of bad drivers. But anyone who heard about it or asked about performance on various forums knows about layers.force-enable in about:config.