Nvidia hardware acceleration: what's wrong with vdpau? is va-api on?

logothete · 2022-02-15 04:14:25

I’m struggling to get hardware acceleration via my NVIDIA card to work. VA-API might be doing something, though I know not what, while VDPAU is definitely not working at all – and the error I get doesn’t tell me anything. Pardon any useless information, or if I've just botched my attempt to read and follow the wiki.

My setup is:

Device: HP-envy-15-ep1020, with an OLED HiDPI screen,
Integrated GPU: Intel TigerLake-H GT1 [UHD Graphics]
Discrete GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile / Max-Q
Generally running x11 with KDE.
Kernel is 5.16.9.

Direct info:

vainfo 
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.13 (libva 2.13.0) 
vainfo: Driver version: VA-API NVDEC driver 
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints 
     VAProfileMPEG2Simple            : VAEntrypointVLD 
     VAProfileMPEG2Main              : VAEntrypointVLD 
     VAProfileVC1Simple              : VAEntrypointVLD 
     VAProfileVC1Main                : VAEntrypointVLD 
     VAProfileVC1Advanced            : VAEntrypointVLD 
     <unknown profile>               : VAEntrypointVLD 
     VAProfileH264Main               : VAEntrypointVLD 
     VAProfileH264High               : VAEntrypointVLD 
     VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointVLD 
     VAProfileHEVCMain               : VAEntrypointVLD 
     VAProfileVP8Version0_3          : VAEntrypointVLD 
     VAProfileVP9Profile0            : VAEntrypointVLD 
     VAProfileAV1Profile0            : VAEntrypointVLD

I find it somewhat peculiar that I only have VAEntrypointVLD entries, and nothing under VAEntrypointEncSlice, which is very different from the wiki, but for all I know I’ve actually got this working. Whereas --

vdpauinfo 
display: :0   screen: 0 
Error creating VDPAU device: 1

Which doesn’t tell me anything.

What’s installed :

yay -Q | grep -E "nvidia|libva|vdpau"        
lib32-nvidia-utils 510.47.03-1 
libva 2.13.0-1 
libva-nvidia-driver 0.0.5-1 
libva-utils 2.13.0-1 
libvdpau 1.4-1 
mesa-vdpau 21.3.5-1 
nvidia 510.47.03-6 
nvidia-prime 1.0-4 
nvidia-settings 510.47.03-1 
nvidia-utils 510.47.03-3 
vdpauinfo 1.4-1

Environment variables:

env | grep -E "LIBVA|VDPAU" 
LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=nvidia 
VDPAU_DRIVER=nvidia

More General Info

glxinfo -B 
name of display: :0 
display: :0  screen: 0 
direct rendering: Yes 
Extended renderer info (GLX_MESA_query_renderer): 
   Vendor: Intel (0x8086) 
   Device: Mesa Intel(R) UHD Graphics (TGL GT1) (0x9a60) 
   Version: 21.3.5 
   Accelerated: yes 
   Video memory: 3072MB 
   Unified memory: yes 
   Preferred profile: core (0x1) 
   Max core profile version: 4.6 
   Max compat profile version: 4.6 
   Max GLES1 profile version: 1.1 
   Max GLES[23] profile version: 3.2 
OpenGL vendor string: Intel 
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa Intel(R) UHD Graphics (TGL GT1) 
OpenGL core profile version string: 4.6 (Core Profile) Mesa 21.3.5 
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 4.60 
OpenGL core profile context flags: (none) 
OpenGL core profile profile mask: core profile 

OpenGL version string: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 21.3.5 
OpenGL shading language version string: 4.60 
OpenGL context flags: (none) 
OpenGL profile mask: compatibility profile 

OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.2 Mesa 21.3.5 
OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 3.20

grep -iE 'vdpau | dri driver' /var/log/Xorg.0.log 
[    32.371] (II) modeset(0): [DRI2]   DRI driver: iris 
[    32.371] (II) modeset(0): [DRI2]   VDPAU driver: va_gl 
[    32.400] (II) NVIDIA(G0): [DRI2]   VDPAU driver: nvidia

finally, if one checks whether the NVIDIA gpu is doing anything, while playing video on firefox, one finds that it really isn’t:

nvidia-smi 
[*time redacted *]        
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 
| NVIDIA-SMI 510.47.03    Driver Version: 510.47.03    CUDA Version: 11.6     | 
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+ 
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC | 
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. | 
|                               |                      |               MIG M. | 
|===============================+======================+======================| 
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce ...  Off  | 00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A | 
| N/A   41C    P8    12W /  N/A |      5MiB /  6144MiB |      0%      Default | 
|                               |                      |                  N/A | 
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+ 
                                                                               
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 
| Processes:                                                                  | 
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                  GPU Memory | 
|        ID   ID                                                   Usage      | 
|=============================================================================| 
|    0   N/A  N/A       907      G   /usr/lib/Xorg                       4MiB | 
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

In the words of bad standup everywhere: is this thing on?

seth · 2022-02-15 10:57:28

This is a hybrid system, you're running on the intel chip.
https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/nvidia-prime/

prime-run vdpauinfo

logothete · 2022-02-15 14:59:49

Seeing the same thing here.

prime-run vdpauinfo
display: :0   screen: 0
Error creating VDPAU device: 1

Any logs you'd like?

V1del · 2022-02-15 15:10:34

I don't think VDPAU was ever included in the PRIME dev efforts. FWIW I'd think it makes more sense to do the HW decoding on the iGPU instead anyway since you lose the advantage of doing copyless presentation via an offload in any case.

FWIW to check whether VAAPI would work anyway, you did configure firefox to use VAAPI decoding right? https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefo … celeration

logothete · 2022-02-15 15:49:23

Oh, whoops. I figured the higher level "enable hardware acceleration when possible" would have done that, didn't realize it needed addressing in the config. Changed it now.

Arch Linux

#1 2022-02-15 04:14:25