Interesting - will see if I can toy with it. Word of caution though. I’ve found that on my machine (Linux/nvidia) unaccelerated video is way more power efficient. The second video is playing it kept the GPU in a high power state and that uses incrementally more power than the cpu doing software decoding I had always assumed gpu would obviously be more efficient until I measured it
I haven't been able to get Firefox GPU acceleration to work on Linux in forever.
Works out of the box for me on CachyOS, both amd and nvidia
Cool, have been using vulkan video decoding via mpv for a while now and it seems fine with little or no performance hits. Glad it's made its way here as getting hardware decoding to actually work in ff has felt like a house of cards (more options are welcome). Does something need to be done to enable/switch to it?
Yes, while the Chrome/Chromium hardware decoding, or any other uses of the GPU, like WebGL, was always impeccable on Linux, with Firefox that was always an adventure, much more often not working than working (at least with an NVIDIA GPU). So I also hope that Vulkan decoding might solve this behavior of Firefox on Linux.
Interesting, I've personally had the exact opposite experience: Chromium hardware decoding was always half-broken for me and nearly impossible to get working, whereas in Firefox, I had to modify a single setting in "about:config" 5 years ago and it's worked perfectly ever since.
Interesting - will see if I can toy with it. Word of caution though. I’ve found that on my machine (Linux/nvidia) unaccelerated video is way more power efficient. The second video is playing it kept the GPU in a high power state and that uses incrementally more power than the cpu doing software decoding I had always assumed gpu would obviously be more efficient until I measured it
i am bit confused, what does it mean by vulkan video decoding? does it mean that it will be done via gpu or via hardware accelerator sepcific to decoder via some vulkan extension? if it is via extension gpu would be free to do gpu specific things?
It's a Vulkan extension to use dedicated video decoders like QuickSync, NVDEC and VCN. It's not using shaders.
Interesting - will see if I can toy with it. Word of caution though. I’ve found that on my machine (Linux/nvidia) unaccelerated video is way more power efficient. The second video is playing it kept the GPU in a high power state and that uses incrementally more power than the cpu doing software decoding I had always assumed gpu would obviously be more efficient until I measured it
Interesting. through, from a pure power POV you probably would want to exclusively use the integrated graphics most CPUs have (1) with the external GPU powered down for most "daily/office-style" usage (browser, news, email, coding (not gamedev,etc.)) and only switch to external GPUs for Gaming, GPGPU, and I guess some edge cases like too many monitors or insisting on running a coding IDE at >240Hz ;) EDIT, forgot the…
No iGPU on my CPU (5800x3d). So was straight software decode (well maybe AVX2?) against GPU decode. GPU route was 80W more.
joebonrichie's comment was excellent though - there is a new nvidia tweak that eliminates the GPU going to a high power state the second it sniffs video. So now GPU & CPU get me the same draw.
>enough for many peoples daily "office" needs
Yeah been considering using my mac air for when not gaming / messing with LLMs, but frankly struggling with it on UX.
Are you using nvidia-vaapi-driver? If so, you'll need to set `CUDA_DISABLE_PERF_BOOST` in your environment.
Oh that’s interesting. I shall investigate thanks. edit: very quick test with MPV seems to confirm this works - eliminates the gnarly additional GPU draw. Measuring draw at wall now puts CPU and GPU route on equal footing...both basically the machines idle draw. Tested both 264 and 265...same outcome. 3090. Thanks!
Bonus discovery I just learned. Under nvtop -> F2 -> Processes -> Fields -> there you can make it show encode/decode. It's disabled by default
Well, supposedly. But in my experience, there was no consequence disabling the blacklist in order to enable hardware video encoding and decoding.
My assumption would be, when there is a large corpus of crash reports for a certain configuration of hardware, knowing if it's a hardware failure, driver bug, or software incompatibly, is pretty hard. So it's probably easier to catch false positives and not get blamed for a faulty product, even if you aren't the cause. Drivers crash under the hood in windows all the time, even today, but once MS did a better job of just restarting the offending drivers where possible instead of BSODing, people thought windows was an unstable product. Which is technically true from the users perspective, even though it wasn't Microsoft's fault directly. You may have had a good combo that simply shouldn't have been on the list/was later patched/or your system is more stable that the average persons.
Well, supposedly. But in my experience, there was no consequence disabling the blacklist in order to enable hardware video encoding and decoding.
My assumption would be, when there is a large corpus of crash reports for a certain configuration of hardware, knowing if it's a hardware failure, driver bug, or software incompatibly, is pretty hard. So it's probably easier to catch false positives and not get blamed for a faulty product, even if you aren't the cause. Drivers crash under the hood in windows all the time, even today, but once MS did a better job of j…
There was nothing special about my setup. Standard intel processor with i915 driver which I would imagine covers a fairly large chunk of installs out there.
Yes, while the Chrome/Chromium hardware decoding, or any other uses of the GPU, like WebGL, was always impeccable on Linux, with Firefox that was always an adventure, much more often not working than working (at least with an NVIDIA GPU). So I also hope that Vulkan decoding might solve this behavior of Firefox on Linux.
Interesting, I've personally had the exact opposite experience: Chromium hardware decoding was always half-broken for me and nearly impossible to get working, whereas in Firefox, I had to modify a single setting in "about:config" 5 years ago and it's worked perfectly ever since.
I guess my caveat always is that I use Fedora (which does not include hw codecs by default due to licensing) and have to manage mesa/ffmpeg stuff myself. Adds a bit to the frustration (though it's self-inflicted so I don't usually complain :)