So I also hope that Vulkan decoding might solve this behavior of Firefox on Linux.
Have you seen the massive blacklist Chromium maintains?
Programs that are converted to Vulkan should work with any GPUs.
VA-API works very well with the GPUs that support it, while the NVIDIA video API also works very well with the GPUs that support it, i.e. the NVIDIA GPUs.
The Vulkan video API has worked well for some time on NVIDIA, I switched my video player to it long ago.
Eventually the Vulkan video API should work well on all GPUs, so there will be a unified video API on Linux.
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
For NVIDIA, that means Ampere or newer (RTX 30xx or newer).
Turing or older (RTX 20xx or older) do not have support for AV1.
Vulkan has the advantage of providing a unified interface for video decoding.
Previously on Linux some programs were written to use only the Intel API or only the NVIDIA API. Fewer programs could use any of the 2 video APIs. (The AMD GPUs also supported the Intel API.)
With Vulkan, the same program should work with any GPU.
Vulkan has specific functions for different video codecs. To be able to use the hardware GPU support for AV1, the program that uses Vulkan for video decoding must also include support for AV1, i.e. it must invoke the corresponding Vulkan functions.
For now, it is not clear if Firefox already includes support for all codecs. In the initial version they could have included only partial Vulkan support, for instance only for H.264 video decoding, with the intention to add complete Vulkan support in some future version.
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Firefox 153.0 Beta
I did try Bergamot but that was a year ago, and the experience was not as good as Chrome...
It's fully local, which means the translation might not be as good as what Google can do, but it's good enough to use, and in my experience it's usually faster, as there is no network latency (except for the first translation between a language pair, which takes a little while to download the weights).
Also, I expect one or more of the following from a 50" 8K TV at that price:
- Bundled with ad/spyware.
- Poor image and/or sound quality.
- Doesn’t last long, or image quality very noticeably degrades after a relatively short amount of use.
I also wonder if perhaps it’s still like back when HD was still new, where TVs would advertise “Full HD”, but were actually only referring to being able to accept a 1080p input signal which they would then downscale to their <720p LCD panels.
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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.
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.)
I have used NVIDIA GPUs on Linux continuously since 2005, i.e. for 21 years.
During this time I have been using more than a dozen different kinds of desktop NVIDIA GPUs, both GeForce and Quadro (I have multiple computers). I have also used several kinds of laptops with NVIDIA GPUs, both GeForce and Quadro, from Dell and from Lenovo. I have also used NVIDIA Jetson SBCs, with NVIDIA Volta GPUs.
On all these many kinds of hardware and during these 21 years, I have never had any problem with the NVIDIA GPUs, either on Linux or on FreeBSD (NVIDIA is among the few hardware vendors who also provide FreeBSD device drivers).
On the other hand, I have had various problems with my AMD GPUs, or, more rarely, with my Intel GPUs (OpenGL defects on both, while with certain AMD GPUs I had problems in multiple monitor configurations).
Today I have more AMD GPUs than NVIDIA GPUs, but that is because I use the AMD GPUs for computational purposes, while the NVIDIA GPUs are used for graphics.
I use many programs based on OpenGL, and the quality of the graphics has always been perfect with NVIDIA GPUs, while in the past it was quite bad on both AMD GPUs and Intel GPUs, regardless whether the "professional" closed-source AMD drivers were used, or their open-source drivers. By bad I mean that the AMD and Intel GPUs failed to render correctly some complex images drawn with OpenGL, unlike the NVIDIA GPUs, which were flawless. The quality of the AMD and Intel drivers has improved a lot in recent years, but I have not checked whether now they really match the NVIDIA drivers in all cases.
While the above was about OpenGL, where there has never been any doubt that the NVIDIA device drivers are the best, regarding video, there is more than a decade since I have never used any monitors that are not 4k resolution, 10-bit per color component and P3-D65 (Display P3) wide color gamut. I frequently watch various high-resolution movies, using various kinds of video codecs on an NVIDIA GPU and the quality of rendering has always been impeccable. Though unlike with OpenGL, with video I also do not remember ever having any problem on Intel GPUs.
I do not doubt that there must be cases when NVIDIA does not work well on Linux, but I am certain that those are never caused by the NVIDIA drivers alone, but by some interaction with other installed software that may have been written to work only with other GPUs.
For example, even if some years ago Firefox had worked with my NVIDIA GPU, that got broken at some point and for the last few years Firefox claims to not detect any GPU, so WebGL and hardware video decoding do not work, and all efforts to force their enabling in the Firefox configuration have failed, even if other browsers like Chromium and Vivaldi work perfectly and a great number of other graphics or video programs also work perfectly. Firefox is the only program that I have ever used and that has not worked fine with NVIDIA GPUs.
I certainly assign this bug to Firefox, not to the NVIDIA drivers, which also work perfectly with the programs that I write myself.
Among the Linux kernel developers, there are some who for some weird reason have sabotaged the NVIDIA drivers from time to time for many years, by making various gratuitous changes in the Linux kernel API for device drivers, designed with the precise purpose of breaking the existing NVIDIA drivers.
Every time when this happens, the NVIDIA drivers fail to work with the new Linux kernel version, but that is no fault of NVIDIA. This creates an additional work for the NVIDIA maintainers, who must release a new version of the NVIDIA device drivers, as soon as they succeed to design a workaround for the Linux API changes. The workaround may be difficult, because in many cases the Linux kernel has stopped exporting certain functions used by the NVIDIA driver, restricting their use to device drivers with different code licenses. This export conditioned by the license of the driver that imports it has no legal basis and no relationship whatsoever with the requirements of the GPL.
This is the reason why some people claim that they could not boot some Linux system with certain NVIDIA drivers. I also assign this fault to the Linux kernel developers who had intentionally broken the NVIDIA device drivers, which I consider a childish and unprofessional behavior. There is no doubt that NVIDIA cannot be criticized when this happens.
To be clear, I consider that it is extremely bad and undesirable to run on your computer any privileged code, e.g. a device driver, which is not open source.
However, this policy should not be something that kernel developers enforce by artificial restrictions. They should try to educate their users to avoid unsafe closed source device drivers, but when a user has serious practical reasons to make an exception, that should be the user's decision, and it is not the role of a kernel maintainer to forbid this.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Vulkan-Video-Disable-New
That link says that only the Vulkan video encode functions have been disabled, due to bugs.
Vulkan video decoding remains enabled also in the Intel GPU drivers.
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.
It's broken.
The button is there and is clickable, and there even is an animation near the address bar, but it doesn't actually do anything.
One person's lived experience is another person's “supposedly”.
Nonetheless, I have not seen any evidence about such a relationship. The freezes never occurred while the computer works alone and some program uses the GPU. In all cases the freezes happened right after some quick mouse movement.
The culprit is definitely somewhere in the device drivers, and it cannot be excluded that this may have something to do with NVIDIA, because I do not remember if I have ever seen identical freezes with AMD or Intel GPUs, but that could be just because I have spent less time using directly such computers, instead of using them remotely through SSH.
In any case, this bug is something that requires interactions with the mouse driver, perhaps also with the keyboard driver, and the X server might also have some role.
In such cases, network and HDD/SSD activities appeared to continue normally, only the display was frozen and the keyboard and mouse did not respond. While the initiator could have been something done by the X server, something was stuck in the kernel, because not even the keys that should be intercepted by the kernel worked, as you have also said.
This is certainly a bug whose cause has not be discovered for many years, but it is not yet clear whether it really has anything to do with NVIDIA, since its main effects are upon keyboard and mouse.
I had such an issue recently, on a laptop with an Intel igpu and an Nvidia primus card.
I'm not a coward, so I debugged the system, and found that the crash was caused by the Intel i915 driver trying to do some tricky hdmi related mumbo jumbo with the hdmi port that wasn't even connected to the igpu, it was connected to the nvidia gpu.
When I contacted intel bugtracker, they just said "ah, Nvidia... well, even though their kernel module is open, it's not on the mainline kernel, so go fsck.ext2fs yourself".