Sane YouTube FPS on FireFox on OpenBSD
One thing I really want to be able to do is to load YouTube and put it in background as my work music. On OpenBSD the playback performance is a meh. Espically on Chromium. Opening a 720p 60FPS YouTube video yeilds ~10% frame drop in YouTube stats. Beyond that, the actual rendering rate feels more like 15 FPS. I tried different flags in Chromium but nothing seemed to boost it back to 60FPS. I turned back to Firefox and it was better then Chromium immediately. At ~5% frame drop and a much better real rendering rate.
And so I looked into about:support
and about:config
and to figure out how can I make GPU acceleration work. FireFox GPU acceleration works on Linux. And OpenBSD borrows Linux's display stack and uses the same X11 architecture. There's hope that I can make it work.
Messing around with flags does work! This probably weakens some security. But heck. It's still much better and what I got on Linux. Now the support page shows I'm using GPU. Just a screenshot to prove it works:
![Image: Firefox showing GPU working! Firefox showing GPU working!](/images/gemlog/openbsd-firefox-gpu.jpg)
To be specific, I changed the following flags:
gfx.webgpu.force-enabled : true
gfx.webrender.compositor.force-enabled : true
gfx.x11-egl.force-enabled : true
layers.acceleration.force-enabled : true
gfx.webrender.all : true
After these changes. Scrolling on comlicated pages become much more responsive (almost as smooth as on Linux!). And YouTube playback now is almost perfect.
![Image: OpenBSD playing YouTube video at 60FPS with almost no frame drop. OpenBSD playing YouTube video at 60FPS with almost no frame drop.](/images/gemlog/openbsd-yt-video-playback.jpg)
![Author's profile. Photo taken in VRChat by my friend Tast+](/images/profile6.webp)
Martin Chang
Systems software, HPC, GPGPU and AI. I mostly write stupid C++ code. Sometimes does AI research. Chronic VRChat addict
I run TLGS, a major search engine on Gemini. Used by Buran by default.
- marty1885 \at protonmail.com
- Matrix: @clehaxze:matrix.clehaxze.tw
- Jami: a72b62ac04a958ca57739247aa1ed4fe0d11d2df