Arch Linux

sjb113

Member

Registered: 2025-11-08

Posts: 1

Hardware decoding works on Nvidia GPU in Brave but unclear how

I'm very new to Arch and have been trying to set up hardware video acceleration with my 2080 Ti. After reading the archwiki pages https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardwa … ion#NVIDIA, and https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chromi … celeration I attempted to set this up for Brave. After experimenting with different commandline flags, I found that I was able to get hardware decoding using only

--enable-features=AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL,AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxZeroCopyGL

and if I remove [emp]AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxZeroCopyGL[/emp], despite the wiki saying this is optional, hardware decoding no longer works. Additionally, I did not need to use the [emp]VaapiOnNvidiaGPUs[/emp] option which the wiki says is necessary to get hardware decoding with an Nvidia GPU to function.

I know that Nvidia don't have an implementation of VA-API, so I am completely lost as to how this is working and I'm not really comfortable with not knowing even remotely what is going on especially given it goes against the documented advice.

I would really appreciate if someone more knowledgable would be able to share some insight into what is happening.