nvidia-vaapi-driver VS profiler

For anyone wondering, I got hardware acceleration working (NVIDIA 1660 Super: h264, vp8, vp9, don't know why I can't get HEVC support currently) using the nvidia-driver-545 using the steps from nvidia-vaapi-driver to build from source (version: 0.0.11)

I don't think it's your fault and I don't think you're using the wrong browser.

> I should be working out the dependency story and compiling some driver from Github myself.

no, nvidia _should_ make it easier for people using the 3rd most popular desktop OS to use their hardware. It would make them more competitive against AMD and Intel, which both support hardware video decoding.

That's probably not going to happen, so the next best option is to install a package from the package manager [0]. There might be some kind of compilation needed, but in my experience that's rarely an issue (aside from time), especially if it's coming out of the package manager for a popular distribution.

> It's just not a real option for maybe 99% of PC users.

well, 99% of PC users with Nvidia hardware. It's an important distinction since this problem is specific to Nvidia. If the solution is to installing a package from the package manager, it's only as difficult as installing the browser in the first place.

I do agree there's some extra questions that may make things difficult, or unfamiliar for the vast majority of people, though. Like how is someone supposed to know they need the nvidia-vaapi-driver package anyway?

[0] - https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver#package-manag...

to be honest, pop os solved most of my problems except the hardware acceleration problem which seems like an issue with Nvidia. I am planning to try this soon. https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver/ as mentioned in the comments

RpmFusion only has v0.0.9 of nvidia-vaapi-driver although release v0.0.10 adds support for Nvidia drivers v535. https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver/releases/tag/v0.0.10

I do have one machine with the Firefox PPA rather than the snap, and that's because I've got an NVIDIA card in it and want to use an experimental library.

Note that as an nvidia gpu owner you need to do some extra backflips to make firefox use hardware decoding such as installing a custom vaapi-to-nvdec translation driver: https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver

General VDPAU vs VA-API video acceleration pains. Needing a community driver for imperfect VA-API support, that nvidia updates have broken multiple times.

Don't use VDPAU, this driver is much better: https://github.com/elFarto/nvidia-vaapi-driver

Probably your best bet is to use the Firefox Profiler once it starts hogging the CPU to try to see what it's doing. I'd be happy to take a look at the result although I don't have a lot of experience at diagnosing performance problems; hopefully the profile will make it obvious what's going on.

I tried using the https://profiler.firefox.com/ and running with:

You can try to reproduce while taking a profile using the Firefox profiler, then share it in the #perf:mozilla.org room on Mozilla's Matrix instance.

Run a profiling session for ~30 sec when you notice something is running slower than you expect, see https://profiler.firefox.com/. Share results here if you want help interpreting them.

Next time, send a SIGABRT to the main process (kill -6 $(pidof firefox)) and use the resulting backtrace (you will find a link to the crash report in about:crashes) to file a bug. A performance profile could be useful, but you'll need to know first what to capture. This seems like a graphics issue, so try the Graphics preset. Share a link to your report.

https://profiler.firefox.com will be useful if you can capture and share it to developers.

If you can reproduce it in safe mode and a clean profile, capture a performance profile using the clean profile while trying to load a problematic webpage, don't remove any information from it, and share it here (although it's typically not easy for users to analyse them), or file a bug with it attached.

Next time, capture a performance profile using the Graphics preset, and kill the browser by entering kill -6 $(pidof firefox) in a shell. This will create a bug report (unless debian disables the crash reporter) that would indicate where Firefox is stuck at. You might need to use an official build to get useful results.