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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

Benchmarks are nice and all but for me the main browser issues on Linux has always been "does HW acceleration work out of the box, or do I need to fuck around with flags and MESA and Wayland configs after reading tutorials online based on the GPU I use?".

Winning benchmarks was no use if watching a youtube or netflix video would nuke my battery life and turn the laptop fan into a a scramjet on afterburner, and watching youtube is what many people use their laptops for bott for entertainment and for learning.

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Firefox seems to work fine nowadays on X11 with an AMD iGPU. I haven't had a reason to try Wayland recently, and last time I checked it wasn't fully supported by some of the stuff I use (IntelliJ, mainly, and IIRC electron apps).

But I wonder if HW acceleration is actually that helpful in practice. Judging by CPU use hovering around a few percent, watching videos on Firefox or mpv is unloaded to the GPU. But my laptop still gets fairly hot. I haven't actually tried to compare battery life between CPU and GPU decoding, but I figure the heat has to come from somewhere, right?

One fun fact I've noticed is that the laptop gets less warm while watching 4k YT videos than FHD. Even if I have it scaled to FHD resolution (my external screen is 4k, but not the laptop's panel).

(Well written) Electron apps have fully supported Wayland for a while now, without any issue. I've been using VSCode on Wayland (native) without a hitch for more than a year. Discord is more problematic due to them being a bunch of donkeys, but there are workaround for the motivated tweaker (like using another version of Electron).

I didn't look too much into it since X11 worked fine for my needs, but my understanding was that some applications used too ancient versions of Chrome. One which I remember specifically was teams.

Teams on Linux is essentially abandonware. Just stick to the PWA with a Chromium-based browser and you'll notice it works a billion times better than however the "app" has ever done before

Sure, that's what I use nowadays. But, I actually find it works worse. The only improvement is that I can now authenticate with my YubiKey, which the older version didn't support.

But otherwise? It's terrible. Notifications are hit-and-miss, especially since chromium by default seems to "suspend" the page. When the notifications do work, there's no "urgent" tag on the window, so if I've missed the notification popup, I don't know someone's waiting for me. They've "improved" the layout during calls, so that when someone shares their screen, there are always a bunch of useless icons around it instead of going full-screen. And the old version used to draw a red rectangle around what was being shared. Now I get a tooltip at the bottom of the screen, which sits half below my screen edge and the other half is partially obscured by the launcher. Plus, its "hide" button doesn't do anything.

HW acceleration on Linux is a mixed bag. You have to ensure that it is always working. If it's not broken in the browser (am looking at you Chromium, with a slight side eye to Firefox) then your GPU might not support the video codec requested by the video service.

In my case, I have hardware that supports HW accel for avc and other "legacy" codecs but not av1. Which YouTube likes to use randomly and the only way to confirm if they are using it is by checking the video stats on YouTube. There are ways to disable the browser from requesting av1 from YouTube but I stopped using the official interface in favor of other privacy-respecting clients which to my knowledge don't request av1.

I'm pretty sure it was using hardware acceleration since the cpu usage was so low. Using mpv and forcing it to use the CPU has it jump to something like 20-25%.

In my case with Intel hardware, how I make 100% sure that it's activated is using a program called intel-gpu-tools, with it if you run intel_gpu_top as root you'll get the video acceleration stats shown to you. Pretty sure Nvidia has something similar but am not sure about AMD.

There's radeontop, but it doesn't seem to say anything about video acceleration. mpv does say what it uses and complains when you ask it to do something unsupported, and since there's a clear difference in CPU usage between hardware and software decoding, I figure CPU use is a good enough indicator.

I tend to watch yt vids at 2x speed or higher and hw acceleration is important on my little xps13. If I don't have it enabled, the laptop runs noticeably warmer and my cpu spikes up to like 80-90% usage instead of ~ 40%.

There's a huge difference on my laptop (Intel iGPU + nvidia dGPU, though the nvidia chip has no video decode capability) in battery life between software decoding and using the Intel quicksync hw codecs, at least with mpv. Using the dmabuf-wayland vo is especially efficient (though theoretically lower quality than gpu-next/gpu).

>Winning benchmarks was no use if watching a youtube video would nuke my battery life

Part of that, of course, will be because YouTube forces video codecs that may not have hardware acceleration on your platform, preferring their bandwidth over your power consumption (which, of course, is their right - and is a cross-browser issue)

>Part of that, of course, will be because YouTube forces video codecs that may not have hardware acceleration on your platform

Codecs supported by Youtube (VP9 and x264) have had GPU HW acceleration support on most PCs and laptops sold in the last 8-10 years or longer, just that browsers on Linux never enabled it out of the box because of the wild number of variable on the graphics HW acceleration stack (Mesa, Wayland, VA-API, Nvidia, FOSS/proprietary driver, etc) made it impossible to guarantee it would actually work out of the box, so it defaulted to SW, and HW acceleration was left for the user to tinker figure out on his own, unlike on Windows where you never even had to think about it, it was always working the moment you installed the bowser.

I think the point they were making is that the ecosystem of VP9 decoding GPUs and the driver, OS, browser stack on top is smaller than the ecosystem of H264. av1 even more so.

Somewhat agree but would go a step further, benchmarks at their very best are useless, at worst are completely misleading from an end user pov. Rendering and interpreting garbage as fast as possible is distant second from filtering it out right off the bat when it comes to performance. Curating the browsing experience via content blocking can literally make orders of magnitudes of difference. Youtube is a prime example.

Before Firefox v115 I had to go into about:config and enable vaapi. For some reason it was disabled by default even on Intel graphics PCs. With v115 that step is not needed. One can confirm with intel_gpu_top and check the video decode bar.

I have an nVidia GPU, and it shows slight less load in Firefox compared to Chrome.

No special settings there. Install nVidia drivers, install Firefox, there's no step three.

Both use the GPU itself rather than the video engine. If you want to use the Video Engine of the GPU, you need to use something like VLC.

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