Sometime in the past 10 days there was an update that suddenly made Youtube playback in Chromium-browsers (in my case Chromium and Vivaldi) seem choppy. It now looks like my CPU is chugging and can’t handle the framerate, but looking at the system monitor, all cores are doing fine. But it’s not only the playback of the videos itself, it’s also scrolling through the thumbnail list. It seems laggy now.
I’ve heard that 43 is doing away with xorg, so maybe this is some conflict with Wayland and xorg that’s not resolved? Idk. I just know that in Firefox and Librewolf, playback remains fine. The use or not use of browser extensions has no effect on the chugginess in the Chromium browsers.
Do you see anything suspicious when you open vivaldi:gpu in “Graphics Feature Status” (or I guess chrome:gpu on Chrome)? Interesting would be “Video Decode” and in general all the items that report “Disabled”.
Yeah, some things pop up as disabled. But that could have already been the case, I don’t know.
Graphics Feature Status
=======================
* Canvas: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
* Direct Rendering Display Compositor: Disabled
* Compositing: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
* Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
* OpenGL: Disabled
* Rasterization: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
* Raw Draw: Disabled
* Skia Graphite: Disabled
* TreesInViz: Disabled
* Video Decode: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
* Video Encode: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
* Vulkan: Disabled
* WebGL: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
* WebGL2: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
* WebGPU: Disabled
* WebNN: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
Problems Detected
=================
* WebGPU has been disabled via blocklist or the command line.
Disabled Features: webgpu
* WebGL2 has been disabled via blocklist or the command line.
Disabled Features: webgl2
* Accelerated rasterization has been disabled, either via blocklist, about:flags or the command line.
Disabled Features: rasterization
* Accelerated video encode has been disabled, either via blocklist, about:flags or the command line.
Disabled Features: video_encode
* Accelerated video decode has been disabled, either via blocklist, about:flags or the command line.
Disabled Features: video_decode
* WebGL has been disabled via blocklist or the command line.
Disabled Features: webgl
* Gpu compositing has been disabled, either via blocklist, about:flags or the command line. The browser will fall back to software compositing and hardware acceleration will be unavailable.
Disabled Features: gpu_compositing
* Accelerated 2D canvas is unavailable: either disabled via blocklist or the command line.
Disabled Features: 2d_canvas
OK, that explains what is happening, that is basically everything disabled or done in software. Now the question is: why?
For reference, on my system it looks like this:
Graphics Feature Status
=======================
* Canvas: Hardware accelerated
* Direct Rendering Display Compositor: Disabled
* Compositing: Hardware accelerated
* Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
* OpenGL: Enabled
* Rasterization: Hardware accelerated
* Raw Draw: Disabled
* Skia Graphite: Disabled
* TreesInViz: Disabled
* Video Decode: Hardware accelerated
* Video Encode: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
* Vulkan: Disabled
* WebGL: Hardware accelerated
* WebGL2: Hardware accelerated
* WebGPU: Disabled
* WebNN: Disabled
[...]
Problems Detected
=================
* WebGPU has been disabled via blocklist or the command line.
Disabled Features: webgpu
* Accelerated video encode has been disabled, either via blocklist, about:flags or the command line.
Disabled Features: video_encode
* [a few more workarounds for specific problems]
I am afraid this is where my ability to support you runs thin, I don’t usually use Chromium-based browsers. I just keep Vivaldi around as a fallback and I have little to no experience with hardware acceleration in Chromium.
Nope, nuking changed nothing. One thing I noticed in Vivaldi is that the video plays normal for one second, then immediately it starts getting choppy. Whatever that means.
Going to dump a few more things I noticed here, in case someone finds this thread via search engine:
The Chromium apps no longer retain their icon after they’re started. E.g. You start up Youtube, and after 1 second the Yotube logo in the KDE taskbar gets replaced with a generic Chromium icon
Right click on the window bar no longer brings up the KDE menu, just a simple browser menu. Options like “Keep on top” etc. are no longer available
Starting Google Earth on Chromium no longer works, all it says is that WebGL is not supported by this browser. I changed none of the browser flags, and the flag for WebGL is not disabled.