Firefox 80 To Support VA-API Acceleration On X11

[curfew]

Well, at least now KDE users will stop complaining. Though will the performance be actually improved, or is it token VAAPI support that with enough copies will end up as slow as software video?

Based on my non-benchmark, fiddling around with htop that is, there is a measurable performance gap but it is still far from good.

Playing Full HD video in "legacy mode" would produce about 130 % CPU usage in htop figures. With hardware acceleration this would come down to around 90 %. However, when hardware acceleration is enabled, I would see Mutter consume around 10 % constantly whereas without it Mutter stays at around 2-3 %. So there is some weird compositor-related overhead on the Gnome desktop / Mutter.

Note: Above figures are summed up and include all Firefox processes. This means the main process and some renderer processes.

When I play Full HD video in MPV, CPU consumption is around 20 %, so in my mind this should be target for Firefox as well. These numbers are under Wayland; on Xorg a video player hardly consumes any CPU time. So there is overhead even with regular video players when on Wayland. Based on this Firefox might actually perform a lot better on Xorg once it gets hardware acceleration support as well.

[DanL]

can I use the hardware acceleration with my Nvidia video card under X11?

For formats supported by vdpau-va-driver wrapper, yes. For experimental VP9 support, see: https://github.com/xtknight/vdpau-va-driver-vp9

The second question is: it is real hardware acceleration of video?

Huh? What is fake hardware acceleration?

[nxij]

The browser fails to render with EGL enabled for me on the propietary nvidia drivers.

You can try:
Open about:config and enable gfx.webrender.compositor, gfx.webrender.enabled, media.ffmpeg.vaapi-drm-display.enabled, media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled

Launch the latest Nightly of Firefox with:
env MOZ_X11_EGL=1 firefox-nightly

[curfew]

The second question is: it is real hardware acceleration of video?

Fake hardware acceleration means using a GPU-targeting API which actually ends up processed by the CPU. So it all comes down to whether or not you are running on LLVMpipe instead of proper display drivers / graphics card. Ask yourself, not us.

[pranav]

Enabling VAAPI under Wayland



https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1610199

But the bug report is still open.
Doesn't that mean we should not bother enabling it in the first place?

[arabek]

The browser fails to render with EGL enabled for me on the propietary nvidia drivers.

You can try:
Open about:config and enable gfx.webrender.compositor, gfx.webrender.enabled, media.ffmpeg.vaapi-drm-display.enabled, media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled

Launch the latest Nightly of Firefox with:
env MOZ_X11_EGL=1 firefox-nightly

Nvidia drivers do not support vaapi and vice-versa.

[nxij]

Nvidia drivers do not support vaapi and vice-versa.

There is a vdpau to vaapi translation layer available that works with vaapi patched Chromium including 8K vp9.

[sverris]

Vaapi already works with FF78, but it is not yet enabled by default, right?

[holunder]

Is this the first time any Linux web browser has ever had official X11 hardware acceleration of video? I know there have been some unofficial patches for Chrome floating around that I think some downstream distributions applied.

Gnome's Web/Epiphany actually has hardware decoding for a few years now.

[Danny3]

This is wonderful news and the kind I expected to hear from Firefox development.
While my DE (KDE Plasma) supports Wayland in theory, in practice is still buggy so I decided not to use it until more bugs are fixed.
Now I'm really happy that the video hardware acceleration will work on X11 too.
And I bet there will be many happy people too which use DEs that don't have any option to use Wayland otherwise like MATE and Cinnamon.
Many many thanks to the developers who solved this problem!