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Firefox 153 available with support for Vulkan video decoding, JPEG-XL

phoronix.com

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Re: Firefox 153 available with support for Vulkan video decoding, JPEG-XL

#21

Post by creshal »

temp0826 wrote: post #14

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?

The primary advantage of dedicated hardware accelerators for the past ~15 years been power efficiency, rather than performance. Not much of a problem on a desktop, but very noticeable on mobile devices.

Re: Firefox 153 available with support for Vulkan video decoding, JPEG-XL

#22

Post by dathinab »

Havoc wrote: post #6

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 food note (1): Even the very very minimal GPU recent (non APU) AMD processors have are good enough for many peoples daily "office" needs.

Re: Firefox 153 available with support for Vulkan video decoding, JPEG-XL

#23

Post by dathinab »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #7
Havoc wrote: post #6

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

All modern CPUs come with an iGPU, so it's unlikely to be software decoding. Just iGPU driver's decoder being more efficient than dGPU one.

I assumed the OP/comment means "software vs. hardware accelerated rendering" when they say "it uses the CPU. And iGPU is still hardware accelerated rendering.

But some modern video codecs are designed to work quite okay with software rendering, especially if it's lower resolutions, and modern higher end dGPUs often have a pretty high "power overhead" on low utilization. To add to it the driver might keep it in a more high power state then strictly needed due to "expecting" more utilization, or similar.

Re: Firefox 153 available with support for Vulkan video decoding, JPEG-XL

#24

Post by RamRodification »

Matl wrote: post #20
adrian_b wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Yes, while the Chrome/Chromium hardware decoding, or any other uses of the GPU, like WebGL, was always impeccable on Linux Have you seen the massive blacklist Chromium maintains?

Blacklist of what? I don't understand what a blacklist would be used for in this context. Specific unsupported hardware?

Re: Firefox 153 available with support for Vulkan video decoding, JPEG-XL

#25

Post by sunaookami »

DemiGuru wrote: post #4
robtherobber wrote: post #2

Was there a link to the project on Github? I think that you've mistakenly shared Github's search tool/path

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-153-Downloads

That's not the final release, that's an RC and tech blogs should stop reporting this as final. There were instances in the past where the RC had critical bugs.

Re: Firefox 153 available with support for Vulkan video decoding, JPEG-XL

#26

Post by cwillu »

RamRodification wrote: post #24
Matl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, while the Chrome/Chromium hardware decoding, or any other uses of the GPU, like WebGL, was always impeccable on Linux Have you seen the massive blacklist Chromium maintains?

Blacklist of what? I don't understand what a blacklist would be used for in this context. Specific unsupported hardware?

Yes.

Re: Firefox 153 available with support for Vulkan video decoding, JPEG-XL

#27

Post by roryirvine »

Matl wrote: post #20
adrian_b wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Yes, while the Chrome/Chromium hardware decoding, or any other uses of the GPU, like WebGL, was always impeccable on Linux Have you seen the massive blacklist Chromium maintains?

Yeah, Chromium even blacklists perfectly ordinary 2020s "choose this for a quiet life" Intel igpus that work fine in Firefox (and, weirdly, Chrome itself).

First thing to do with Chromium has always been adding various flags to force-enable things, followed by changing a bunch of chrome://gpu settings. Not sure why Chrome does better, but it's closed source so no reasonable way of knowing what it was up to.

Firefox did go through a rough patch 4-5 years ago where it needed various things in about:config to get hw decode when running under Wayland, but it's gone back to working out of the box for me in whatever ESR version has come with the last couple of Debian releases.

Re: Firefox 153 available with support for Vulkan video decoding, JPEG-XL

#28

Post by newusertoday »

Havoc wrote: post #6

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?

Re: Firefox 153 available with support for Vulkan video decoding, JPEG-XL

#29

Post by cwillu »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #7
Havoc wrote: post #6

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

All modern CPUs come with an iGPU, so it's unlikely to be software decoding. Just iGPU driver's decoder being more efficient than dGPU one.

Neither of the last two processors I've purchased in the last few years had any iGPU.

Re: Firefox 153 available with support for Vulkan video decoding, JPEG-XL

#30

Post by nullify88 »

cwillu wrote: post #26
RamRodification wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blacklist of what? I don't understand what a blacklist would be used for in this context. Specific unsupported hardware?

Yes.

Well, supposedly. But in my experience, there was no consequence disabling the blacklist in order to enable hardware video encoding and decoding.
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