r/Ubuntu • u/BreadfruitParking395 • 1d ago
Help needed
I want to setup browser GPU video decoding, how to check if my intel integrated gpu is being used for for video decode? i dont care if its firefox or chrome or brave or whatever, can anyone pls help me how to correctly check it?
intel_gpu_top on both firefox and brave shows video: 2-3% and render/3d: 40-50%, while playing yoututbe video 720p is it normal?
in brave inspect->more tools->media-> hardware decoder is true
still after all these i see my CPU frequency shot up to maximum sometimes whenever i change video or play the video in 1.5x or 2x and my laptop heats up
my specs:-
Kernel Version: 7.0.0-38-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-11400H @ 2.70GHz
Memory: 16 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: Intel® UHD Graphics
nvidia rtx gpu disabled fully by sudo prime-select intel, nvidia-smi shows nothing
1
u/AlexeyK77 13h ago
two utilites for monitoring your intel igpu encode\decode hardware acceleration.
- intel_gpu_top
- nvtop. - you can configure different graphics, encode and decode utilisation separately.
2
u/sugary_barrister 1d ago
Intel media driver is already doing the work if you see video at 2-3% in intel_gpu_top, that's the decode engine getting hit. The render/3d at 40-50% is the compositor and browser drawing the frames, which is normal on Wayland especially with integrated graphics.
For a more direct check you can run `sudo intel_gpu_top` and look at the video row while the video plays, if it moves at all you're decoding on the gpu. You can also check `vainfo` to see what codecs your iGPU supports and whether the driver is loaded correctly.
720p youtube is usually vp9 or av1, both should decode fine on an 11th gen i5. The dev tools media info in brave showing just the codec doesn't tell you much about where it's decoded, the intel_gpu_top output is more useful.