Firefox Hardware acceleration on Fedora
Firefox supports hardware acceleration on Linux so let's look how to configure it and diagnose potential issues.
Web page rendering
Accelerated web page rendering is supported on both X11 and Wayland backends via. WebRender.
You can check hardware acceleration state at about:support page, look at Compositing row. If there's WebRender, you're running on hardware. If there's WebRender (software) you're on non-accelerated backend.
Web page rendering on Wayland
Hardware acceleration should work out-of-the-box on Wayland. If not please file a bug for it.
Web page rendering on X11
X11 backend can tun in two modes - EGL and XGL. You should be on EGL unless you're running NVIDIA proprietary drivers.
Video decoding
Hardware accelerated video decoding (for video playback or for WebRTC) is available on Intel/AMD via. VA-API for both X11(EGL) and Wayland and can be enabled by preferences at about:config.
Right now it's blocked by RDD Firefox sandbox. RDD is a new sandboxed process used for safe video decoding. You can disable it which reverts Firefox back to state before RDD implementation.
Video decoding on AMD
Accelerated video decoding works well on AMD as free drivers are available. You can enable it by these steps:
- Verify you're running on HW accelerated backend (WebRender) under Wayland or X11/EGL at about:support.
- Install install ffmpeg, libva and libva-utils from RPM Fusion repository.
- Run vainfo on terminal to verify that VA-API works.
- At about:config page set media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled to true and media.rdd-process.enabled to false. Warning: Disabling the RDD process sandbox is a security risk!
- Restart browser.
Video encoding
Hardware accelerated video encoding (for WebRTC for instance) is not supported/implemented in Firefox, no matter which preference you set at about:config page.