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Mercury

Member

Registered: 2024-11-14

Posts: 56  

Chromium-based browsers killed HW accel for some old video cards

Topical to Devuan since this OS is often used to give new life to old systems.

Starting with Chromium 146 (March 2026), the minimum requirement for hardware video acceleration is OpenGL ES 3.0. Some GPUs manufactured around 2010, especially those on some laptop or low-power integrated solutions, only provide OpenGL ES 2.0.

This is a hard requirement. On pre-3.0 GPUs hardware acceleration, including WebGL, will not work. This affects every Chromium-derivative browser, including Chrome, Edge, Vivaldi, Opera, Brave, etc. which takes up Chromium v146 and later.

The most noticeable real-world effect of this is in-browser videos (YouTube, Netflix, etc.) stuttering or becoming unplayable/unwatchable at resolutions that previously worked fine. The browser uses entirely CPU rendering where previous versions could offload some work to the GPU, creating a rendering bottleneck.

The only solution that retains GPU acceleration is to remain at Chromium version 145.

Note this also affects FreeTube, because it is also built on Chromium code, and there is no solution here because old FreeTube versions no longer work with recent changes to YouTube.

The last problem is the one that hit me. I used FreeTube to watch videos since it gave acceptable performance even on old systems. That's no longer possible.

Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/opengl/comment … illed_gpu/

Last edited by Mercury (Yesterday 19:24:40)

tux_99

Member

Registered: 2025-06-17

Posts: 152  

Re: Chromium-based browsers killed HW accel for some old video cards

I usually watch online videos using mpv with yt-dlp, basically all you need to do is run mpv with the URL of the video (for example copy+pasted from the browser):

mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxxx

This is far lighter on the cpu than anything browser-based, even when the browser uses hardware assisted decoding.

This works for many online videos, not just youtube.

you might want to put your yt-dlp preferences in the mpv config file, for example I have the follwing in ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf

script-opts=ytdl_hook-ytdl_path=/path/to/yt-dlp/yt-dlp.sh
ytdl-format=bestvideo[width<=1920][height<=1080][vcodec~=?'^(vp9|h264|avc1)']+bestaudio/best
cache=yes
cache-on-disk=no
cache-pause-wait=5
cache-pause-initial=yes
demuxer-thread=yes
demuxer-cache-dir=/tmp
demuxer-max-bytes=800MiB
demuxer-readahead-secs=15
cookies=yes
keep-open=yes

Last edited by tux_99 (Yesterday 20:02:57)

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Calamity

Member

Registered: 2021-10-23

Posts: 98  

Website

Re: Chromium-based browsers killed HW accel for some old video cards

I just download with yt-dlp and then watch them locally through mpv, though the online approach using the two together as suggested by tux_99 is also a great option.

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deepforest

Member

Registered: 2020-03-24

Posts: 496  

Re: Chromium-based browsers killed HW accel for some old video cards

I can be wrong but Firefox still support HW acceleration for youtube.
I will check this again.

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kapqa

Member

Registered: 2019-01-02

Posts: 766  

Re: Chromium-based browsers killed HW accel for some old video cards

spci-fically ytb can use pipe-viewer

it functions well and lets you adapt to your favorite player.

https://github.com/trizen/pipe-viewer