[SOLVED] How to enable HW acceleration in Firefox?

[PatH57]

just want to make sure that after all the fiddling around done you are still on the default settings
your hw acceleration is set to 0/1 basic will mine is 0/4

let's just proceed step by step and focus on firefox before going down the graphic card driver path

[eanfrid]

It is caused by an OpenGL code cleanup that had consequences since Firefox 28. The solution is here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1394765

Code: Select all

Description de la carte	X.Org -- Gallium 0.4 on AMD JUNIPER
Fenêtres avec accélération graphique	1/1 OpenGL (OMTC)
ID du périphérique	Gallium 0.4 on AMD JUNIPER
ID du vendeur	X.Org
Rendu WebGL	X.Org -- Gallium 0.4 on AMD JUNIPER
Version du pilote	3.0 Mesa 10.2.2
windowLayerManagerRemote	true
AzureCanvasBackend	cairo
AzureContentBackend	cairo
AzureFallbackCanvasBackend	none
AzureSkiaAccelerated	0

[gtsfer]

Eanfrid rocks!

[PatH57]

well it's as always an option to try.
Keep in mind, yours is a juniper version so an oem rebadget version (marketing trick to sell older cards leftover from the opengl scene as "new" models for the end user market) Even the name was catchy back in 2010 so they had something new for 2011, you have to love these guys.
It has a beefed up firmware and a bit more memory and uses opengl for rendering (that's what the commercial card was intended to do, not to difficlt to imlement would one say and it didn't cost you an arm and a leg to buy one)


Let's see...

[eanfrid]

@patH57: you probably read that the OP in the thread I posted as a link has an NVidia card It is actually a feature related to OpenGL, as long as your GPU can use hardware accelerated OpenGL rendering.

Edit: the trick to give you back hardware acceleration brings some glitches, at least on my screen, with tabs redrawing.

5209304d44ab6.png

[PatH57]

Hi @eanfrid,

you are probably refering to

No more main-thread OpenGL in Firefox (important note for Linux users who use OpenGL)
Main-thread compositing with OpenGL is no more (bug 924403). The only option for OpenGL compositing is off-main-thread compositing (OMTC). This is the first big chunk of code removal following on from the layers refactoring, which began more than a year ago. It is very nice to finally be removing code and reducing the number of code paths in the graphics module.

Most users should not notice a difference. All supported configurations which use OpenGL (FirefoxOS, Android, modern OSX) already use OMTC. If you use OpenGL on Linux, however, read on.

OpenGL in Linux

OpenGL on Linux is not a supported configuration (i.e., fixing bugs is not a priority - we would love some volunteer help here, by the way, get in contact if you're keen). However, if you have good luck with your drivers, then it works pretty well and can be enabled by setting the 'layers.acceleration.force-enabled' pref to true. The main benefit is improved WebGL performance. OMTC on Linux also works pretty well, but is also not a supported configuration. If you want to continue using OpenGL on Linux for versions of Firefox 28 and later you will need to use OMTC. (Note that if you are considering trying OpenGL on Linux for the first time, you should use a new profile to make it easier to undo if your drivers are not cooperative. And be prepared for your system to crash, potentially).

They also insist on the weakness of the driver support and be prepared for a crash potentially

Again your card is a native opengl card with heavy tweaks on the firmware so it is way more robust and can flush a lot of errors that his card may not handle
But then again who am I to judge I reversed engineered quadro cards to get the last drop of performane in Doom opengl back in the good olds days .Let's wait and see...

Best of luck.
Patrick

[Methylzero]

Thanks everyone for the help, you rock But especially thanks to eanfrid, for finding the cause of my problems and a solution(even though it is a bit buggy, at least I now know whats going on, and have the choice).

[PatH57]

Great

Gave us a lot to talk about

[eanfrid]

They also insist on the weakness of the driver support and be prepared for a crash potentially

Again your card is a native opengl card with heavy tweaks on the firmware so it is way more robust and can flush a lot of errors that his card may not handle

Yep. I agree with you. I only tested the solution to make sure that it was working, but I won't use it because on my config the gains are marginal at most. The important point was to find the cause and the possible solution. Using OMTC is not perfect but as he said, the OP now is aware of what was the point and can make his own decision

[PatH57]

talked to an old friend at nvidia who is now developping cuda libraries for HPC environment. He knew about OMTC and will take a look into the code (it will give him an excuse to reopen the old opengl box) Let's see what he comes up with.

[eanfrid]

Small update to this thread, about minor glitches encountered when OMTC was enabled (as told above: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 97#p888103 )

I tried on several machines using GTK-based DEs (Cinnamon, XFCE, MATE) with Firefox 31: these glitches are gone. So OMTC can probably be safely enabled if you want hardware acceleration back in Firefox