Hardware acceleration stopped working after updating Brave to 1.52.117 from 1.51.118
How can this issue be reproduced?
Expected result:
intel_gpu_top should show Video/… percentage counters
Brave Version( check About Brave):
1.52.117
Additional Information:
O/S: Ubuntu Linux 20.04.6 LTS, kernel 5.15.0-67-generic
Hardware: Dell XPS 9310, Intel Iris Xe video
maybe it works with newer unbuntu 22.04?
I’m sorry, I don’t know about 22.04 on the same Intel hardware, I can’t try.
I have another Linux PC with NVidia, GPU can check it tomorrow.
PS more details to bugreport:
Tried different command-line options. Current ones (that allow acceleration for old version):
/usr/bin/brave-browser-stable --enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder --disable-features=UseChromeOSDirectVideoDecoder
I checked with (old) Brave 1.51.118 on 22.04 (powerful PC with Nvidia GPU) – Frankly speaking I don’t know how to make a fine check whether it uses GPU for video decoding or not.
But according to CPU usage it looks it doesn’t.
There are several important observations:
on desktop PC with NVidia for both versions (1.51.118 and 1.52.117) the options (–enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder --disable-features=UseChromeOSDirectVideoDecoder) do not make any sense. The only difference could be observed if “Use hardware acceleration when available” is enabled (300% CPU average for brave process) or not (400%). Given the so high CPU usage for 4K video on powerful workstation (AMD Ryzen 3700X, GTX 2060) I make an assumption that hardware acceleration is used only for browser itself, not for video decoding.
On Intel laptop (that is relatively weak: Intel i7-1165G7, Iris Xe) the difference could be easily distinguished.
Old version of Brave 1.51.118:
New version of Brave 1.52.117:
Hereby it means that hardware accelerated video decoding is broken in the new version.
Basically it’s very important for laptops, given the limited battery life and temperature. So I noticed this because my laptop started heating so much.
I haven’t managed to enable accelerated video decoding on my workstation, there is no much sense to do so. For the laptop I used this guide https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hardware_video_acceleration
If it’s needed I can try
maybe v1.52.122 will address this? it didn’t fix the Light mode issue I’ve been having…but I haven’t rebooted
I tried v1.52.122 – it’s futile 
maybe today’s release fixed things?
Hello, thank you for the response, I tried 1.52.126 – it is not helpful. The regression is still here
I have same problem as you are so for right now I have to downgrade and keep it at 151 to use HWA. I used about the same method you used but following a different guide. Here is link
How To Enable Hardware Accelerated Video Decode In Google Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi And Opera Browsers On Debian, Ubuntu Or Linux Mint - Linux Uprising Blog
Near the end of the guide there is a section with graphical guide on how to tell if you have HWA or not in a sure way.
Yes, it’s so frustrating. Hardware acceleration was the only reason to me to use Brave browser
For me, I thought that Brave browser is safer and come with extra privacy like option for Tor with privacy mode.
Firefox on latest update and with linux mint on 22.04 version and HWA seem to work fine there. I’m using a chromebook with intel 620 graphic
I think these linux users found a solution. It is for arch linux however. I don’t know if it can be applied for ubuntu and others too
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=244031&p=33
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