The Widevine CDM is responsible for decoding the video, and on desktop platforms so far only software-based DRM is supported, though they're planning to introdu

The Widevine CDM is responsible for decoding the video, and on desktop platforms so far only software-based DRM is supported, though they're planning to introduce hardware DRM for Widevine on desktop soon, which would enable higher quality streaming and possibly also hardware acceleration. So far they're only planning to support this on Windows 10 and above, maybe macOS support will come at a later date, but Linux users will almost certainly be left in the dust, considering they already don't support VMP (Verified Media Path) on Linux, resulting in many streaming services limiting video quality to SD or blocking streaming on Linux altogether.