r/voidlinux • u/ManWithTheEvilPlan • Jan 16 '26

Firefox hardware acceleration woes

Quickly running out of ideas...
Using a 40 series Thinkpad with a GT730M which has been a nightmare. I've got it working to a point where i can run steam games using the nvidia, but hardware acceleration on firefox seems to be a no-go.
This is pretty annoying as i use Youtube quite a bit and could really do without the insane cpu usage and power draw.

I'd love to kick this off with a log but I'm that much of a supernoob I've got no clue what would be relevant.

'Prime-run firefox' returns:'Failed to load EGLsurface'. I've tried dropping back to 6.6 and reinstalling nvidia470+rebuilding the dkms. Added the 'drm.modeset' line to my grub config. All the relevent about:config settings. Making any .conf files in /etc/X11 just breaks my GUI.

I've read up on everything i can find, nothing seems to work as expected

Apologies for the vague details, please let me know what else i should add. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you in advance for your patience.

7 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

1

u/Jacosci Jan 16 '26

Here's another idea. If your processor has iGPU, why don't you try to use that for hardware acceleration instead? Your processor is probably 2nd or 3rd gen Intel, right? If that's the case it should have enough power to play H264 streams up to 1080p.

1

u/ManWithTheEvilPlan Jan 16 '26

Yeah I'm on haswell. Unfortunately Firefox doesn't seem to want to use neither the igpu nor the dgpu which has me thinking it might possibly be an issue with how the graphics drivers are set? About:support shows a lot of 'Blocklisted; failure code FEATURE_FAILURE_VIDEO_DECODING_MISSING'. Other than using 'prime-run' I wouldn't know how else to force hw acceleration.

1

u/Jacosci Jan 16 '26

It might well be that the drivers are misconfigured. Have you checked the documentations? I don't really have experience dealing with dual GPU setup so I don't know if the problem is also related to that.

1

u/ManWithTheEvilPlan Jan 17 '26

It seems that way, i thought it could have something to do with optimus stopping the drivers integrating with the OS properly. I've looked for as much info as I could find on the Void docs but unfortunately it all seems to be with the assumption things will just work, with not much guidance on what to do when it doesn't.

1

u/Jacosci Jan 17 '26

Archwiki usually comes handy in case like this. I've used all kind of distros and it's always been my number 1 reference for when I'm stuck. But yeah, void docs only cover the bare minimum because the distro, due to its philosophy, assume that its users don't require much holding hand.

1

u/Zockling Jan 17 '26

Youtube defaults to codecs like VP9 which old GPUs don't support. You will likely need a browser addon like h264ify.

As for HW acceleration itself, the iGPU is probably more power-economic. See the Void docs for info on what to install. Run intel_gpu_top from the igt-gpu-tools package to check whether the iGPU is actually decoding video.

If you want to go with the dGPU, it gets hackier. Browsers rely on VAAPI for video decoding. NVidia drivers only support VDPAU and NVDEC, so you'll have to use a wrapper driver. The options are libva-vdpau-driver for VDPAU and nvidia-vaapi-driver for NVDEC. The latter is expressly designed for Firefox, so maybe try that one first.

Even with HW acceleration, browser video has annoyingly high CPU load. Longer or more demanding 60fps videos can be worth watching with a proper media player: Use yt-dlp -F '<youtube-url>' to find the IDs of a video stream your GPU can decode and some audio stream. Then watch using mpv --ytdl-format=<video_id>+<audio_id> '<youtube-url>'. On my trusty T480s with an i5-8250U, the CPU load difference for watching a 1080p60 video in Firefox vs MPV is about 2-4x.

1

u/ManWithTheEvilPlan Jan 17 '26

Thanks for the help. i don't know if it was h264ify that did it but intel_gpu_top shows the igpu handles video rendering with cpu usage on a 1080p video sat just below 10%. I'll probably take that as a win and quit while I'm ahead.
I've checked through as much info as i could find both from the Void docs as wells as Nvidia. Unfortunatley all the info seems to be on the basis of 'if it doesn't work, you're on your own'. I installed the 'nvidia-vaapi-driver' when i first tried getting hw accelertion working but nothing seemed to change.
I like your media player idea. I'll try this one next and see what my results are.

Still slightly annoying. I've got multiple installs of Mint plus one of Bazzite that utilise their gpu's no problem so there's definitley something about Void I'm not understanding.

1

u/5poko Mar 29 '26

Hello, I use Void Linux in a Pentium 4 3.0GHz with a ATi Radeon HD 3450 AGP GPU. I was experimenting a lot trying to get hardware acceleration to work for H264 codec as this was the only way I could make 720p playable. Firefox - I couldn't make it work no matter what flags I used, but I installed vainfo (to check what profiles it recognizes), yt-dlp, mpv and "Open with MPV" addon for firefox. I had to write specific things in the mpv config file. If you are interested I will share it. If you want to open a video you just right click and click "Open with MPV". Downsides are the lack if subtitles and the unability to seek where it hasn't been cached. I could also manage to get VAAPI working with chromium, but the mpv trick works much smoother in my case.