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

8K decoding needs HW acceleration, unless having 8-16 cores with AVX-512.

I could also imagine the decoded output being pluggable into Vulkan-based filters (mpv uses https://code.videolan.org/videolan/libplacebo) without slow device->host copying.

> 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?

Nvidia drivers on Linux are not really display quality. The effort goes towards CUDA for headless rigs. They work great for AI and that's it. Pair them with an AMD and Intel card for display, graphics and video acceleration. Otherwise you end up with too many cases of booting into a black screen, random software breaking, games not working, bad performance and just jank in general.

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.

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!

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.

Works out of the box for me on CachyOS, both amd and nvidia

It's a Vulkan extension to use dedicated video decoders like QuickSync, NVDEC and VCN. It's not using shaders.

"All" really isn't true, most AM4 Ryzen chips don't have iGPU (unless they are specificly APUs), and a lot of Intel chips have popular 'F' SKUs without an iGPU.

The iGPU's video decoder could even be drastically less efficient than the dGPU's decoder, and it would still be better to use the iGPU, because just powering up the PCIe link and VRAM for the dGPU costs far more power than the video decoding itself.

What makes you think the unaccelerated path would use the accelerated iGPU path? Typically hardware decoding is disabled because of driver/reliability issues and thus would switch to software decoding to sidestep these concerns.

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.

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

Not all, most desktop have two options with or without igpu.

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.