WebRender Reaches Beta For GPU-Accelerated Web Rendering In Firefox

[Tvashtar]

Nightlies became significantly faster recently as a result of switching to clang and enabling both pgo and lto for release builds by default. Especially in graphical operations/benches like motionmark. Just remember to disable debug stuff like poisoning and asynchronous stack.

[smitty3268]

Neither the article nor the blog entry tell me why I should wish to have that feature. While I use firefox (like right now), top tells me that 0.1% to 0.8% CPU time is used (from the 8+8SMT Ryzen cores) - while staying at their lowest clock frequency possible. Why would I want to involve the GPU and an incredibly complex additional stack of drivers/libraries in this?

It's driven by 2 reasons.

1. Speed up page load times/make animations smoother. This may not seem like a big deal but it's actually the major reason everyone used to say Chrome felt snappier than firefox so boosts to this do get felt, even if people aren't exactly directly aware of it.

2. Use less power, and therefore let you run longer on laptops.

I haven't tried it out so i have no idea how successful or not they've been, but those are at least the goals originally behind this.

[R41N3R]

I use webrender in Nightly since months on my AMD and Intel systems and it works very stable for me. Though the main feature I'm waiting for is Firefox on Wayland even in KDE Plasma :-)

[aufkrawall]

There is no Direct2D equivalent in Firefox' OpenGL renderer, so we don't have GPU rasterization without WebRender on Linux. This is noticeable on some heavy sites where Firefox doesn't display some elements for some time when scrolling. With WebRender, everything is shown instantly.

[Stebs]

Well yes, kind of, but it's the only browser I know of that provides HW accelerated video decoding on GNU/Linux. Be warned though, it is very buggy (not the browser in general, but the HW decoding specifically).

There is also chromium-vaapi(-bin) (at least available on ARCH's AUR).

Video decoding hardware acceleration works for me with both (Epiphany and chromium-vaapi) on an Intel-only Laptop and on an Desktop with Nvidia GPU. (AMD with modern drivers should also not have any problems). It's Vaapi that is always used. Performance is better than without acceleration, but naturally not as good as opening the stream with mpv (or streamlink).

Theoretically Epiphany could use vdpau on Nvidia via gstreamer (gst-plugins-bad)!? but that didn't work, Vaapi via gstreamer-vaapi and libva-vdpau-driver did work though for my Nvidia GPU (proprietary drivers).

...Soo, take that, Devs that whine about soo much Apis and soo buggy drivers: Video acceleration works on linux with vaapi on 2 different browsers and at least on Intel and Nvidia (AMD probably too), without messing around.

PS. How to verify that hardware decoding really works:
With Nvidia simply use the page with the % Video usage in the Nvidia Settings.
For Intel, I use intel_gpu_top (part of intel-gpu-tools) and look at bitstream busy
If there are better (nicer GUI) tools, let me know.

[Brisse]

Stebs I encounter several problems when using gstreamer-vaapi on AMD hardware and the issues are different depending on if I use x.org or Wayland. I also have a bunch of laptops with Intel graphics both old and new variants and it seems to work better on those.

The most severe issue is probably this one: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...i/+bug/1720820
But there are also smaller issues such as graphical glitches and occasional crashes.
No issues in mpv though so I think gstreamer is to blame for most of the problems.

[Stebs]

Stebs I encounter several problems when using gstreamer-vaapi on AMD hardware and the issues are different depending on if I use x.org or Wayland.

I think the "problem" also is that lately a lot is changing with the AMD drivers and also vaapi. So with older Distributions/Kernels/drivers, there might still be more problems. In the bug report, you mentioned VA-API version 0.40.0 , currently I am at: VA-API version: 1.3 (libva 2.3.0).
I practically don't use gstreamer though, only Epiphany uses it, I think chromium-vaapi uses vaapi directly.
I don't really use Epiphany outside of video-acceleration testing. IMHO it is a browser for people who don't know what a browser is.

[Brisse]

Stebs Well, it's been some time since I made that report and in the meantime I've switched from Ubuntu to Debian Sid and even with the latest version of everything all the issues remains.

I don't use these apps much either but I think it's important to point out the issues so they can get fixed. These are apps that many distros ship in their default install and issues like this is going to hurt first impressions for newcomers.

[shmerl]

There is no Direct2D equivalent in Firefox' OpenGL renderer

Firefox uses Skia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skia_Graphics_Engine

[aufkrawall]

And rasterization runs on the CPU instead of the GPU with skia.