As of 2025, Firefox finally supports hardware acceleration, both for layouting, webgl, and for hardware video decoding. On AMD Radeon and Intel GPUs, things just work out-of-the-box. On Nvidia proprietary driver, nothing works as usual; nouveu stopped working for me so I can’t test that.

Layouting

Go to about:support and search for Compositing. If 3d acceleration is enabled, it should say “WebRender”; if it’s using slower software-based layouting it will say “WebRender (Software)”.

You can check HW_COMPOSITING and/or OPENGL_COMPOSITING; it will probably say “Acceleration blocked by platform” on Nvidia proprietary drivers. Good thing is that you can go to about:config and force hardware compositing:

• Set layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true

webgl

Search for WEBRENDER: if it says “available” then it’s enabled. You can test it out at WebGL Aquarium:

• If webgl is working, you’ll get 60+ FPS with 10000 fish, with no CPU usage
• If webgl is not working, you’ll get software rendering and ~13 FPS with 10000 fish

You can try to go to about:config and set gfx.webrender.all to true and test again; on Nvidia Proprietary drivers this might do nothing.

Search for GPU #1: if it says “Description: llvmpipe” then it’s using software 3d renderer.

Nvidia Proprietary

When running Firefox from command-line, I noticed libEGL warning: egl: failed to create dri2 screen. I ran eglinfo and all looked good, so I have no idea what’s wrong. Also running eglgears_wayland worked well. Running eglinfo -B shown something interesting:

Device #1:

Platform Device platform:
libEGL warning: pci id for fd 26: 10de:28e0, driver (null)

pci id for fd 30: 10de:28e0, driver (null)
pci id for fd 31: 10de:28e0, driver (null)
libEGL warning: egl: failed to create dri2 screen
libEGL warning: pci id for fd 26: 10de:28e0, driver (null)

pci id for fd 30: 10de:28e0, driver (null)
pci id for fd 31: 10de:28e0, driver (null)
libEGL warning: egl: failed to create dri2 screen
libEGL warning: pci id for fd 26: 10de:28e0, driver (null)

eglinfo: eglInitialize failed

Asking Grok, he told me that: Nvidia proprietary drivers do not support or expose the DRI2 interface because:

• DRI2 is part of the open-source ecosystem and relies on kernel modules like drm (Direct Rendering Manager) in a way that’s tightly coupled to Mesa.
• NVIDIA’s drivers use their own proprietary kernel module (nvidia.ko) and user-space components, bypassing DRI entirely. They handle rendering directly via NVIDIA’s GLX/EGL extensions.

It also mentions that “DRI2 is an X11 extension”, which is puzzling since I’m running Wayland/GNOME and Firefox is running in Wayland mode too. I guess that Firefox just goes through all offered devices and falls back to Device #2 which is llvmpipe software rendering.

Hardware Video Decoding

Go to about:support and search for “Codec Support Information”. If it says “Hardware Decoding”: unsupported, read on.

Firefox uses VA-API do decode video. To check whether VA-API works, run vainfo in terminal (you’ll need sudo apt install vainfo). If this shows error, you’ll need to install:

• sudo apt install mesa-va-drivers for AMD Radeon (works on Ubuntu 25.10+ only)
• sudo apt install nvidia-vaapi-driver for Nvidia proprietary driver

Restart Firefox and re-check. On Radeon this might be enough; on Nvidia Proprietary the decoding might be blacklisted. Try going to about:config and set media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled to true and restart Firefox. On Nvidia Proprietary this still didn’t help.

Conclusion

Don’t use Nvidia with Linux.