NVIDIA VA-API driver, the free open-source video acceleration API implementation using NVIDIA NVDEC, released new 0.0.18 version yesterday.
The new version finally makes NVIDIA GPU accelerated video decoding usable in Linux with Chrome / Chromium web browser.
Firefox Web Content acceleration through NVIDIA GPU
Hardware video acceleration is a feature that allows GPU to decode video, thus offloading the CPU and saving power.
The popular Firefox (v153 added Vulkan video decoding support) and Chromium browsers rely on VA-API for video acceleration on Linux. The VA-API however does not support NVIDIA GPUs. So, NVIDIA VA-API driver was born to workaround.
The implementation was specifically designed for Firefox users. Now with version 0.0.18, it also makes video decoding with NVIDIA GPU acceleration usable in Google Chrome or Chromium browsers in Linux.
Chromium has a VaapiOnNvidiaGPUs feature for experimental NVIDIA VA-API support. It’s however disabled by default, because the decoded video surfaces from NVIDIA driver is not the format the Chromium expected.
The new 0.0.18 version merged a PR that makes its direct backend output compatible with Chromium.
It works by exporting multi-plane YUV surfaces from the NVIDIA driver as a single dma-buf, with all planes using the same DRM modifier that Chromium expects.
NVIDIA GPU decoding Youtube video in Ubuntu with Google Chrome
So, after installed the driver and enable via LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=nvidia environment, you can enjoy NVIDIA GPU hardware accelerated video decoding in Google Chrome or Chromium by starting browser with VaapiOnNvidiaGPUs flag.
LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=nvidia google-chrome \ --enable-features=AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL,VaapiOnNvidiaGPUs \ --ignore-gpu-blocklist \ --use-gl=angle --use-angle=gl
While GNOME, KDE Plasma and other Linux Desktops with Wayland also need --ozone-platform=wayland. So the command to specify environment variable and start Chrome/Chromium could be:
LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=nvidia google-chrome \ --enable-features=AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL,VaapiOnNvidiaGPUs \ --ignore-gpu-blocklist \ --use-gl=angle --use-angle=gl --ozone-platform=wayland
For chromium and its based browsers, replace google-chrome in command accordingly.
Other changes in NVIDIA VA-API Driver 0.0.18 include:
- Fix HEVC decoding artifacts caused by incorrect VA-API-to-NVDEC parameter translation.
- Fix NVDEC decoder initialization with invalid dimensions.
- Fix leaked GPU resources when surface creation fails.
- Fix a possible crash when destroying a decoder.
- Fix an AV1 out-of-memory crash.
- Fix unsafe decoder configuration initialization.
- Optimize NV12/P010 to ARGB conversion.
- Remove wrong information in README.md.
Get NVIDIA VA-API Driver 0.0.18
The official release note as well as the source tarball are available in Github project page via the link below:
Besides building from source, many Linux Distributions have the driver available in their system repositories, though it is often outdated.
For Ubuntu 26.04, Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 22.04, I’ve uploaded the new version into this unofficial PPA for 64-bit X86 and ARM computers.
