Firefox Hardware acceleration on Fedora
Firefox on Fedora supports hardware acceleration on Linux so let's look how to configure it and diagnose potential issues. This guide is adjusted for Fedora only and may not work for stock Mozilla binaries or other distros.
Web page rendering
Accelerated web page rendering is supported on both X11 and Wayland backends via WebRender.
Please note that Firefox requires a GPU with support for OpenGL 3.2 or newer or GLES 3.0 or newer to enable hardware acceleration (Source and further info). You can check your hardware using glxinfo | grep "profile version" for OpenGL and eglinfo | grep version for GLES.
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 on unsupported config (old NVIDIA drivers, NVIDIA drivers on XWayland or so).
Force disable hardware acceleration
For testing purposes you can disable hardware WebRender. Go to about:config page, set gfx.webrender.software to true and restart browser. There should be WebRender (software) at about:support page then.
Video decoding
Hardware accelerated video decoding (for video playback or for WebRTC) is available via VA-API for both X11 and Wayland. Since firefox-101.0.1-4 package it's enabled by default for Intel/AMD users.
You can check VA-API acceleration state at about:support page, look at HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING row. If there's available by default, you're running on hardware by default.
You can disable it at about:config page setting media.hardware-video-decoding.enabled to false.
You may install enhanced-h264ify Firefox extension to disable non-accelerated video formats.
Configure VA-API Video decoding
See Hardware Video Acceleration.
Troubleshooting
- Verify you're running on HW accelerated backend (WebRender) under Wayland or X11/EGL at about:support.
- Run vainfo on terminal to verify that VA-API works.
- Run Firefox on terminal with MOZ_LOG="FFmpegVideo:5" env variable. It produces a playback and decode log with VA-API / ffmpeg details.
- VA-API is also used for WebRTC (video conferencing like Google Meet, Zoom, Bluejeans). If you see any video artifacts you can disable VA-API for it. At about:config page set media.navigator.mediadatadecoder_vpx_enabled to false and restart browser.
- Test different VA-API capable player, for instance mpv by running mpv --hwdec=vaapi test_clip on terminal.
- You may also want to reset custom changes that may be intervening with HW acceleration. To do that, go to about:support and click Refresh Firefox.
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.
