Firefox 80 To Support VA-API Acceleration On X11

[horizonbrave]

Sorry I missed the memo and I'm dumb as fuck. What this brings to the table? Just a bit of power efficiency for laptop users??
Thanks

[ezst036]

Huh? What is fake hardware acceleration?

If we are talking about an AMD video card or APU, then I would suspect that "real" hardware acceleration would leverage the capabilities of the onboard UVD.

"Fake" hardware acceleration might be said to simply use the main GPU chip.

To my knowledge(which is very limited here) the UVD is more efficient than than the GPU, and even vastly moreso than the CPU.

[smitty3268]

If we are talking about an AMD video card or APU, then I would suspect that "real" hardware acceleration would leverage the capabilities of the onboard UVD.

"Fake" hardware acceleration might be said to simply use the main GPU chip.

To my knowledge(which is very limited here) the UVD is more efficient than than the GPU, and even vastly moreso than the CPU.

This is about using libVA, which is hooked up to UVD on AMD chips and whatever hardware other drivers expose through it on their hardware. So yes, it's "real".

I have no idea why this keeps coming up over and over again in all these articles. Are you the same person and just refusing to acknowledge the answers you're getting in each article? Or is this FUD spreading somehow?

[gregzeng]

As a user, what do you care about the market share? Why would you choose a browser based on its market share?

Market share matters very much. More clout, more developers, more third party coders, more add-ons & extensions, more & better alpha & beta testing, etc. In case you did not noitice, poor market sharte means eventual death.

[Veto]

There's no way 9 multiplications and 6 additions need that much extra CPU time. Though back in the day, I remember Adobe complaining about YUV as well...

Well, let's have a look at your assertion: That is 15 floating point operations per pixel you show there. So you need 15*1920*1080*60 = 1 866 240 000 or approximately 2 GFLOPS just to do a simple YUV conversion on your CPU. For 4k video that will be 7½ GFLOPS...

Of course a real implementation will apply some tricks, but still... There is a reason why specialized hardware is a win when doing video conversions!

[pal666]

Adobe Flash player

is not a browser. you could also list addons which download video and run mplayer

then everyone rushed to kill off Flash

everyone including adobe itself. obviously they were wrong because they made birdie unhappy

[pal666]

As a user, what do you care about the market share? Why would you choose a browser based on its market share?

it's the other way around. market share is a result of user choice. i.e. everyone already switched to chrome and improvements in firefox will not affect majority of users

[pal666]

With each new CPU generation they advertise how it consumes 50% less power while providing 50% more computational power. So basically the 8 year old 10W devices could do this, now you have 2**8 = 256 times better power efficiency.

lol, you are taking advertisements too seriously

[pal666]

Impossibru. According to a lot of Phoronix members, this would be a waste of time and resources and Mozilla wasn't working on this.

all of that is true. it was a waste of time and resources and mozilla wasn't working on it. but then omnibenevolent redhat decided to waste some time and resources and do it instead of mozilla. now your joke looks silly, doesn't it?

[pal666]

It doesn't matter if you decode using GPGPU cores or DSP, the process node advancements still apply. I'm just saying super low power devices could decode H264 already 8 years ago. Now I have a fairly recent 14nm Intel chipset and the CPU load is around 70% (single core) when playing 720p H264 in Firefox.

you are being silly. process node advancements apply to progress from 8 years old intel cpu to 14nm intel cpu. but 8 year old intel cpu wasn't able to play video(and btw intel's 14nm is 6 years old) . because it does matter whether you use specialized circuits to decode or not

I'm pretty sure the $1000 laptop is better than first gen RPi in all possible ways. Still the power consumption is much higher when watching Youtube.

because you are dead wrong. it is better in many ways, but it is worse in hardware video decode way(especially when hardware video decoding parts of your laptop aren't used)