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abnud1

Member

Registered: 2024-10-23

Posts: 1

chromium not selecting nvidia gpu as gl_renderer

My laptop has AMD Ryzen 7840HS as well as Nvidia RTX 4050 GPU, so I have amdgpu integrated driver and nvidia discrete gpu.

I already updated my linux system to the latest version.

I'm using nvidia-open driver 560.35.03 with mainline linux kernel.

I tried adding multiple chromium flags, like `--ignore-gpu-blocklist`, `--use-gl=egl`, `--enable-gpu-rasterization`, etc.

All flags tried and still when opening `chrome://gpu` I see GL_RENDERER set to AMD not Nvidia. the only flag that changed GL_RENDERER is `--use-gl=egl` but it changed it to SwiftShader Vulkan 1.3 which I suspect to be a software renderer not hardware one.

I tried running chromium with `prime-run` but still it shows GL_RENDERER set to AMD.

I tried multiple environment variables like LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=nvidia, all doesn't set GL_RENDERER to Nvidia.

I'm not just talking about VA-API, I'm talking about WebGL as well.

Why nothing seems to make chromium use my discrete gpu?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,875

Re: chromium not selecting nvidia gpu as gl_renderer

chromium filters it's environment quite aggressively and probably filters out the flags prime-run sets to change the default renderer order. Also, wayland or X11? Which wayland in case?

That said... the only case I'd see where it makes real sense to opt for the nvidia gpu as the renderer for a browser would be in actual demanding webgpu usecases that you'd expect notable gains from, do you have any such in mind? In terms. of normal browsing as well as video decoding purposes you're far better off with the integrated GPU if it is sufficient for the task at hand, both in terms of battery life and performance. The main win of video decoding is being able to immediately present to the screen whatever got decoded in the GPU, if you have to start copying that again because your rendering device is not attached to the display and the image has to pass to the integrated gpu regardless  you're losing the benefit again.