Firefox Nightly Tries For VA-API Video Acceleration For Mesa Users

[mdedetrich]

Most UIs in Windows are basic GDI stuff that are hardly GPU accelerated at all.

Why do people keep on posting incorrect shit about Windows in a desperate attempt to throw sludge at it. GDI has been GPU accelerated since WDDM 1.1 (i.e. Vista era), see https://stackoverflow.com/a/3415379.

Whether you like it or not, birdie is largely correct here. Windows has, more or less, fixed the GPU acceleration problem for everything that you would sanely would want to be sanely GPU accelerated. Its of course not perfect but considering the backwards compatibility that Windows has to also maintain its miles ahead of Linux whos only success story for GPU acceleration seems to be terminal rendering? (which is hilarious in a tragic way).

Actually just yesterday I was having a meeting with a colleague who is running Fedora and he had to switch from Wayland to X11/Gnome to get OBS to work (with Wayland he was having a delay between sound and video recording). The switch to X11/Gnome fixed that problem however he now has the problem that when he uses the blue filter (which is meant to use GPU acceleration) in Google meet with Firefox the video freezes for ~5-6 seconds at a time because its actually using the CPU rather than the GPU.

And before anyone blames NVidia, this is on an Intel laptop using the discrete GPU on Fedora...

So yeah sorry for the reality check, but GPU acceleration story in Linux is complete and utter shambles and its actually personally my last straw that convinced me to get a macbook pro for work because I was sick of tired of having stuttering in video conferencing because it was using the CPU (and since I am not so young anymore, I don't really have the time to fuk around with all of the flags/settings/GPU decoder APIs with browser to get it to work).

[Mahboi]

I would applaud this, but I'm kind of wondering about the results to expect.

I just finally managed to get my chromium-based browser (Vivaldi) to run HW accelerated decode. The results were not what I expected.
My CPU went from 8% usage on watching Youtube to 5%. Twitch was roughly the same.
My GPU memory speed went from 45% average to 100% at all times the video was on.

I'm not sure if my config is wrong, Mesa or VA-API are too demanding in memory speed, or what it may be, but I really expected basically no extra work from the GPU and quite a lot offload from the CPU, and it seems to be the opposite.

[aufkrawall]

And before anyone blames NVidia, this is on an Intel laptop using the discrete GPU on Fedora...

"So before anyone blames Nvidia, this is with Nvidia". Are you a clown?
Apparently, as you mistake rudimentary GDI drawing features "Windows has, more or less, fixed the GPU acceleration problem for everything" with full-blown GPU acceleration...

Fun task for you: Try to achieve vsynced rendering with GDI.

[mdedetrich]

"So before anyone blames Nvidia, this is with Nvidia". Are you a clown?

No, there are a lot of clowns on Phoronix that do this though (they literally argue that everything is perfect with Intel/AMD GPU's and with NVidia everything is broken).

Apparently, as you mistake rudimentary GDI drawing features "Windows has, more or less, fixed the GPU acceleration problem for everything" with full-blown GPU acceleration...

Fun task for you: Try to achieve vsynced rendering with GDI.

Apparently you missed the bit where I said it wasn't perfect but if your argument is incredibly minor grievances like vsync for a literal decades old DE/compositor API that has since already been replaced then you kind of already proved my point.

In case its lost on you, Linux ecosystem can't even get incredibly basic use-cases working rather than whining about vsync on a compositor/DE.

[oleid]

I'm not sure GTK or Qt under Linux accelerate any drawing operations. Window management is accelerated when using compositing - that's it.

Gtk4 does via Vulkan and OpenGL backend

[Alexmitter]

Not protecting birdie, but you are missing the point. birdie questions state of GPU acceleration in Linux desktop per se. He did not ask for advice on software.

Is GNOME fully GPU-accelerated (whatever that means) because they have enough manpower (funded by RedHat to some extent) to make it work, or because interfaces (Mesa or whatever) are adequate and everyone can make their desktop GPU-accelerated without much pain?

Gnome is a shell on top of Mutter, Mutter consists of Metacity and Clutter with Clutter playing the main role. It is a fully 3D accelerated stage, every movement, transition, UI element on the shell is fully OpenGL Hardware rendered. If it were not for llvmpipe, you could not even start Gnome on a system without proper OpenGL 3D acceleration hardware

[Ermine]

Gnome is a shell on top of Mutter, Mutter consists of Metacity and Clutter with Clutter playing the main role. It is a fully 3D accelerated stage, every movement, transition, UI element on the shell is fully OpenGL Hardware rendered. If it were not for llvmpipe, you could not even start Gnome on a system without proper OpenGL 3D acceleration hardware

Maybe great. This is not related to question I asked, though.

[birdie]

Gtk4 does via Vulkan and OpenGL backend

How can I be sure about that? Is there a simple test to run to verify that? A demo or something? Also, is it just GTK4? What about GTK3? Qt5? Qt6?

Again, I need solid proofs, not "I've heard about Vulkan and OpenGL backends" - I did as well. Doesn't make me all so confident.

There are quite annoying bug reports on the topic: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/4112

[s_j_newbury]

I think it's more like Mozilla not caring about Linux consumers because the userbase is small when compared to Windows.

Which is why Firefox loses market share. Post-Netscape, they started out as the alternative browser, at the time against IE, but had to have a compelling use case: a major one in its favour being the cross-platform support, since IE was Windows only. Chromium dominance made that easy win less compelling, but they could have maintained it by simply doing better than Google for non-Windows. They dropped that ball.

I still prefer to use Firefox though.

[binarybanana]

Been using vaapi for years in Firefox. It works great. Playing 1080p60 video uses <10% of a core. Fantastic savings.

Also funny how things like XRender are hw acellerated on X11 (even uses dedicated 2D hardware on Intel), but apparently on Wayland it's all software rendering except for the composition step? Or what's going on?

BTW, if the laws in your country are unethical and don't allow you to use the things you paid for legally, then it's your moral duty to break them.