NVIDIA VA-API Driver 0.0.12 Brings Fixes, Chrome Compatibility Work

[intelfx]

Why this feature is not available for Linux OSes as default yet?

Because it's not a "feature". It's a software project. If you want "products" with "features" that you can demand, please use proprietary commercial OSes.

[RealNC]

Is this famous nvidia's linux support? They don't even provide VA-API that is long linux standard?
"But, muh VDPAU" Yeah, nobody uses that crap.

I believe VDPAU is deprecated. For Nvidia, you have to use nvdec now. MPV supports it. Unfortunately, it has been bugged some forever in the nvidia driver because when it's being used, the GPU locks to max clocks, temps rise and you get fan noise and higher power consumption because the driver thinks you're running a CUDA application and Nvidia doesn't care to fix it. Great :P

[dragon321]

Using NVDEC on NVIDIA hardware is not always the most power efficient solution. NVDEC (NVENC as well) depends on CUDA so everytime some app uses it GPU is forced to run at higher power state even if it's not needed so for certain codecs and resolution combinations using NVDEC to do video decoding might use more power than doing that on CPU. This also applies to this project as it's using NVDEC under the hood. As far I know Windows driver provides option to disable that behavior (so not automatically switch to higher power state when using CUDA) but Linux drivers are missing that option. What is more interesting this limitation is not shared by VDPAU or Vulkan Video despite the fact that both are using exactly same hardware as NVDEC to do video decoding. Since VDPAU is basically abandoned I guess Vulkan Video is the future.

Still this is pretty good work, hardware acceleration is nice thing to have.

[MorrisS.]

Because it's not a "feature". It's a software project. If you want "products" with "features" that you can demand, please use proprietary commercial OSes.

Do you mean Windows or Mac operating systems?

[intelfx]

Do you mean Windows or Mac operating systems?

Yup, those.

[geerge]

They do. I imagine that there is some power required to "wake up" the card to use that function. You can have like four 4k60fps streams with very little power used to decode them.

I believe it is just a matter of very efficient software decoders that were polished to perfection, together with a very power efficient CPU architecture.

Possibly also the main cores can't be powered down to super low draw, so they might as well decode a low def video than sit idle still burning the power.

[MorrisS.]

Yup, those.

many thanks for the advice