Chromium is better sometimes

Posted Jan 26, 2021 6:49 UTC (Tue) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118)
Parent article: The endless browser wars

I have an use-case where Chromium(-freeworld) is better than Chrome. I'm a casual gamer. So casual I play maybe 5-6 hours per month, so investing in dedicated gaming hardware is unreasonable. Instead I play on Stadia – Google's streaming gaming platform.

First of all, it works only with Chromium and derivatives, like MS Edge. It doesn't work with Firefox.

Second, the core requirement for gaming platforms is a realtime decoding if 1080p or 4k video streams. Chrome on Linux DOES NOT support accelerated video decoding. Software decoder in this browser introduces over 1 second of delay, making first person shooters unplayable.
At the same time, Chromium in RPMFusion repositories carries patches to fix hardware video decoding, making it a better browser than plain Chrome.

It's ironic that Google-provided browser is worse for Google platform than 3rd-party recompile.

(It is also ironic that games available on Stadia are being run on Linux, while there are not available on Linux as standalone)

Chromium is better sometimes

Posted Jan 26, 2021 9:08 UTC (Tue) by sandsmark (guest, #62172) [Link]

> At the same time, Chromium in RPMFusion repositories carries patches to fix hardware video decoding, making it a better browser than plain Chrome.

Not anymore, it just needs to be enabled at build time. Arch Linux has enabled it without patches (AFAIK) for a fairly long time now: https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packa...

Chromium is better sometimes

Posted Jan 26, 2021 11:21 UTC (Tue) by juliank (guest, #45896) [Link] (3 responses)

It's not "worse", it's just that vaapi can be incredibly unstable and crash your system, and Google does not want to deal with the bug reports from that.

Chromium is better sometimes

Posted Jan 26, 2021 23:39 UTC (Tue) by mss (subscriber, #138799) [Link] (2 responses)

It's not the VA-API itself that is unstable but the backing GPU and its drivers.
Often not only when decoding videos but also when doing just hardware-accelerated OpenGL rendering.

It looks like GPUs are designed primary with performance in mind, not long-term stability.

Chromium is better sometimes

Posted Jan 29, 2021 16:52 UTC (Fri) by sheepdestroyer (guest, #54968) [Link] (1 responses)

These are the same GPUs running hardware decoding by default on Windows.

Chromium is better sometimes

Posted Jan 29, 2021 17:55 UTC (Fri) by mss (subscriber, #138799) [Link]

This could be due to variety of reasons, from Windows users being used to getting a BSoD from time to time, Windows GPU drivers emulating certain known-problematic operations in software, to GPU vendors deprecating driver support for older chips quicker.