Chrome 70 Retrying For AV1 Decoding, Full Support For TLS 1.3 & Priority Hints

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Chrome 70 Retrying For AV1 Decoding, Full Support For TLS 1.3 & Priority Hints

With Chrome 69 out the door and that having marked Chrome's 10th birthday, Google developers have Chrome 70 in their dev channel fresh out of the oven...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Chrome-70-Dev

[Danny3]

It's nice to see that Chromium developers are working on "Continued Vulkan rendering preparations.".
Too bad that Firefox developers don't care about Vulkan.

[Szzz]

Too bad that Firefox developers don't care about Vulkan.

They are porting WebRender to use gfx-rs which is abstraction over Vulkan/Metal/DirectX.

[andreano]

As for disabling AV1, my guess is that the decoder is still too slow.

I tried Bitmovin's demo in Firefox 63. It was watchable in 200kbit/s, but was dropping most frames at 500 kbit/s and up. I think it was using only one thread. I am curious to know if that is the decoder's fault or Bitmovin forgot to encode with tiles. AFAIK, AV1 does not enforce a minimum number of tile columns per horizontal resolution like VP9.

[starshipeleven]

It's nice to see that Chromium developers are working on "Continued Vulkan rendering preparations.".
Too bad that Firefox developers don't care about Vulkan.

Ahem https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n...al-Vulkan-Code

[Wilfred]

It's nice to see that Chromium developers are working on "Continued Vulkan rendering preparations.".
Too bad that Firefox developers don't care about Vulkan.

At least firefox has an experimental wayland solution, chrome doesn't.

[Danny3]

Ahem https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n...al-Vulkan-Code

On that article from the comments I understood they chose to support DirectX12 instead of Vulkan on Winows, which doesn't make any sense to me...
Especially that DirectX 12 is not and will never be available on my Windows 7 machines, but Vulkan is.
So Vulkan doesn't really seem to me that it's supported.

[Danny3]

They are porting WebRender to use gfx-rs which is abstraction over Vulkan/Metal/DirectX.

If that will give me good performance with Vulkan or DirectX 11 on Windows 7 and Vulkan on Linux, then I'm happy with it.
Thanks for the information!

[franzhaenel]

Chrome 70 will be released as beta around September 13th and as stable around October 16. Really looking forward to TLS 1.3 Final (Firefox 63, with TLS 1.3 Final support, will be released on October 23rd)

[starshipeleven]

On that article from the comments I understood they chose to support DirectX12 instead of Vulkan on Winows, which doesn't make any sense to me...

You understood wrong, and in the article it's stated:

run Gecko with GFX-RS. GFX-RS, of course, is the Rust portability initiative with low-level graphics abstractions to map to Vulkan, Metal, Direct3D, etc, depending upon the platform.

Rephrasing:

They are porting Firefox to GFX-RS which is a wrapper for Vulkan, Metal and DirectX. Of course the wrapper will choose the best (or only) API to offload Firefox to. This wrapper is an independent thing (still from Mozilla) and can be used by other applications as well.


From the answers in the other thread, this is a good plan because on Windows 10 and later there is a decent chance that MS will start to lock down stuff with the UWP (their "app" framework, used by the applications you find in their store), which OF COURSE does not provide Vulkan to apps, but only DirectX. Completely unexpected, right?

There is a glimpse of this in the form of Windows 10 S, which is locked down like that (only apps from the store). It's relatively easy to jailbreak, at least for now, and for now you can upgrade to Pro by paying 50$, but it's a big fat warning you cannot ignore if you plan for the long haul.

https://www.howtogeek.com/305363/WHAT-IS-WINDOWS-S-AND-HOW-IS-IT-DIFFERENT/

Windows 10 S is “the soul of today’s Windows”,

and of course we can't have a MS product without the usual twirling moustache cartoon-evil bullshit they traditionally pull:

You can’t change your default browser, and you can’t even install Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Those are desktop applications, and aren’t available in the Windows Store. Microsoft Edge also has a big limitation on Windows 10 S: You can’t change its default search engine. Bing will always be the default. This is a big departure even from Chromebooks, which allow you to choose any search engine you like.
Microsoft noted that “Windows 10 S can run any web browser in the Windows Store” at its May 2 event. That just includes Microsoft Edge right now, but Microsoft clearly wants Google and Mozilla to create browsers for the Windows Store, too.
However, Microsoft is being a little sneaky here. Microsoft won’t let Google package Chrome for the Windows Store, even if Google wanted to. The Windows Store only allows browser apps based on the Edge browser engine, just as Apple’s iPhone and iPad App Store only allows browsers built on the Safari browser engine. You’ll only get a Chrome browser for Windows 10 S if Google creates a new version of Chrome based on Edge (like Google does with its Safari-based Chrome for iOS).
But even if Google did create a version of Chrome based on Microsoft Edge, you wouldn’t be able to make it your default browser anyway.
Microsoft didn’t mention these limitations in its presentation, and they were only discovered in the Windows 10 S FAQ and Windows Store Policies afterwards.

I guess it's easier to wrestle with MS to allow other browser engines in the store than convincing MS to allow a foreign graphics API for their "soul of today's windows", right? I hope at least.

If that will give me good performance with Vulkan or DirectX 11 on Windows 7 and Vulkan on Linux, then I'm happy with it.

The wrapper offloads only to similar API, so Vulkan, DirectX12, or Metal. Directx11 is not an option.

It's probably going to be less efficient than going native, but it's still going to be a net upgrade over older API if they don't screw up.