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I use open source driver for AMD HD6320 video card. I followed the instruction in this article Force Enable Hardware Acceleration in Firefox but if I try to play HD video in firefox it's very slow. How can I be sure that hardware acceleration is used? Thanks.

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Victor
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  • If you install proper driver of dedicated graphics Firefox will use Hardware acceleration from it. It did work for my NVIDIA graphics card – Alex Jones Jan 27 '16 at 11:55
  • I use open source video card driver. Is there any way to test if everything is OK with harware acceleration? Anyway it' strange that if I play HD 1024 video in firefox it's slow. – Victor Jan 27 '16 at 12:45
  • open source drivers are just fine, I use Intel's Open source drivers, also I have disabled my NVIDIA graphic card from BIOS. your firefox is slow maybe because you followed that link you have mentioned in question. if you can undo it, all things will be fine. Pus you dont have to follow any method to enable hardware acceleration it is done by default – Alex Jones Jan 27 '16 at 13:02
  • I just unset all changes I made in the article. The performance on 1080p still is very poor :( – Victor Jan 27 '16 at 13:18
  • you should mention this in question, and rename your question to something like `poor performance on 1080p in firefox` – Alex Jones Jan 27 '16 at 13:41
  • Ok. Done. So now any help will be very wellcome! – Victor Jan 27 '16 at 13:59

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Check out (type as url): about:support This should give you info on supported features (like hardware rendering)

You can try to disable/uncheck hardware acceleration in Firefox. It may feel counter intuitive but has often worked for me. You can find it here:

Tools > Options > Advanced > General > Browsing: "Use hardware acceleration when available"

Another good thing to try is to install Chrome (or Chromium) and check that browser has the same problem. From experience I have had lagging in Firefox but Chrome worked fine.

If you do want to install the ati binary drivers you can go to 

Ubunti Settings > Software & Updates > Tab: Additional drivers

Good luck!

E.F. Nijboer
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  • Sure, I checked it before asking the question. I still think that it's driver issue. Anyway - the chrome has the same problem :( – Victor Jan 27 '16 at 14:23
  • You could try installing the binary driver. I added where you can find it to my answer. – E.F. Nijboer Jan 27 '16 at 14:25
  • I don't want to use fglx driver - only Xorg open source! I have a reason for that because after that I want to install Wayland instead of Xwindows and Wayland use only open source driver. Is there a way to know if the driver installed correctly? – Victor Jan 27 '16 at 14:41
  • to show info on the video card and driver used, try `lshw -C video`. This will show info on the card and the driver, in my case "driver=radeon" (I'm also using the open source drivers). You can also have a look in System Settings -> Details -> Overview: Graphics (my system reports -> "Gallium 0.4 on AMD RV730 (DRM 2.43.0, LLVM 3.6.2)" so I guess you should see something simmilar). For info on OpenGL you need `glxinfo` (install: `sudo apt-get install mesa-utils`) then type: `glxinfo | grep "OpenGL"`. Hope this will help you any further. – E.F. Nijboer Jan 28 '16 at 08:47
  • The output of lshw -C video is *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: Wrestler [Radeon HD 6320] vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] physical id: 1 bus info: pci@0000:00:01.0 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=radeon latency=0 – Victor Jan 28 '16 at 09:33
  • Output of glxinfo | grep OpenGl is OpenGL vendor string: X.Org OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on AMD PALM OpenGL core profile version string: 3.3 (Core Profile) Mesa 10.1.3 OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 3.30 OpenGL core profile context flags: (none) OpenGL core profile profile mask: core profile OpenGL core profile extensions: OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 10.1.3 OpenGL shading language version string: 1.30 OpenGL context flags: (none) OpenGL extensions So.... If everything is OK why the HD 1080p on firefox is so bad? – Victor Jan 28 '16 at 09:37
  • Some time ago I experienced the same you have now. One other reason was that the card gave flags back of capabilities it didn't have and that was assumed to crash the renderer in firefox. Strange thing is that I experienced that problem with Kubuntu. – E.F. Nijboer Jan 28 '16 at 16:30
  • ...Did another complete reinstall of Ubuntu (instead of Kubuntu) also to be sure and left the graphics driver as configured by the installation. It then worked perfectly (and still is). Could it be you use Kubuntu? It was during this short Kubuntu adventure after installing an new ssd and needed to reinstall anyway. Did you try Chrome also by the way? What did you experience then? Just curious because it seems to be a Firefox specific problem. – E.F. Nijboer Jan 28 '16 at 16:30