Hardware acceleration in Linux

Hardware acceleration refers to offloading certain tasks, typically graphical or computational, from the CPU to specialized hardware components like the GPU, video decoder/encoder, or other accelerators. This can greatly improve system performance and efficiency, especially for graphics rendering, video playback, and certain compute-heavy applications.

Types of Hardware Acceleration

  1. GPU Acceleration (Graphics)

  • Used for rendering GUIs, 3D applications or desktops like labwc, cosmic.

  • APIs involved:

    • OpenGL / Vulkan
    • Mesa 3D (open-source graphics library)
  1. Video Acceleration (Decode/Encode)

  • Useful for smooth playback of high-definition video.

  • Libraries/interfaces:

    • VA-API (Video Acceleration API) – Intel, AMD
    • VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) – NVIDIA
    • NVDEC / NVENC – NVIDIA proprietary decoding/encoding
    • V4L2 (Video4Linux) – General video capture/encode API
  1. Compute Acceleration

  • Used in AI, ML, and general purpose GPU computing.

  • Technologies:

    • OpenCL (open standard)
    • CUDA (NVIDIA-specific)

⚙️ How to Check If It's Enabled

  1. GPU Info

    glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer"

  2. Video Acceleration Check

    vainfo      # For VA-API

vdpauinfo   # For VDPAU

  3. GPU workload check

    intel_gpu_top # For Intel Platforms

nvidia-smi    # For Nvidia Platforms

  4. General Acceleration

  • Monitor CPU usage during video playback using htop or top.

  • If CPU usuage is low, hardware acceleration is likely working.

🎥 Video hardware acceleration support in browsers

  1. For Firefox

    • In URL type following:

      about:support # Then scroll down to find Media section to find Codecs supported with Hardware Decoding

  2. For Chrome

    • In URL type following:

      chrome://gpu # Then scroll down to bottom to find `Video Acceleration Information`