So I also hope that Vulkan decoding might solve this behavior of Firefox on Linux.
Have you seen the massive blacklist Chromium maintains?
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Vulkan-Video-Disable-New
I did try Bergamot but that was a year ago, and the experience was not as good as Chrome...
Firefox 153.0 Beta
That has not been my experience at all, using either the old closed source drivers or the newer "open" drivers. (Note: I am referring to the open source Nvidia kernel drivers, not Nouveau.)
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.
One person's lived experience is another person's “supposedly”.