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.

Wayland

Go to the about:support page: the “Window Protocol” setting should read “wayland” instead of “xwayland”. If it says “xwayland”, add MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 to /etc/environment to force Firefox to run on wayland instead of xwayland, then reboot.

Layouting

Go to about:support and search for Compositing. If 3d acceleration is enabled, it should say “WebRender” and you’re all good. 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

But it seem to have no effect on Nvidia.

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, so I gave up.

If hardware video acceleration is blocked with error code FEATURE_HARDWARE_VIDEO_DECODING_DISABLE or FEATURE_FAILURE_VIDEO_DECODING_TEST_FAILED in about:support, you can override it with media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled=true and media.hardware-video-encoding.force-enabled=true.

Vulkan Video: the way out for Nvidia

The VA-API dead-end above isn’t really Firefox’s fault: the Nvidia proprietary driver simply never exposed VA-API the way Mesa does for AMD/Intel. nvidia-vaapi-driver is a shim on top of NVDEC, and it’s brittle. The good news is there’s now a vendor-neutral alternative that doesn’t go through VA-API at all.

Vulkan Video is a Khronos decode/encode API built into Vulkan itself rather than a separate stack like VA-API or VDPAU. The H.264/H.265 decode extensions were finalized in late 2022 (Vulkan 1.3.238), with AV1 and VP9 decode following. Crucially, Nvidia ships working Vulkan Video on its proprietary driver (535+, 570+ recommended), so this sidesteps the whole nvidia-vaapi-driver mess. AMD (RADV, default-on since Mesa 25) and Intel (ANV) support it too.

To test, run:

sudo apt install vulkan-tools
vulkaninfo | grep -iA3 "VIDEO_DECODE"

You should see “QUEUE_VIDEO_DECODE_BIT_KHR”.

Firefox merged a Vulkan Video decode path for Firefox 153 (bug 2021722). It’s behind a pref and may not be on by default, so flip it in about:config:

• media.hardware-video-decoding-vulkan.enabled to true
• media.hardware-video-decoding-vulkan.direct-export.enabled to true (optional, enables a zero-copy path; defaults to false pending broader driver validation)

Supported codecs are H.264, H.265, AV1 and VP9 — anything older still needs VA-API. On Nvidia, AV1 needs driver 550.54.14+ and VP9 needs 580+.

A word of caution: Vulkan Video is still stabilizing. For dedicated players like mpv, VA-API is still the better choice — it tends to draw less power by leaning on the GPU’s fixed-function decode block, and it’s more mature. Vulkan Video’s win is portability: one API across all three vendors, which is exactly what a browser wants. The two will coexist for a while rather than one replacing the other.

Conclusion

VA-API on Firefox+Nvidia was a dead-end for me: don’t use Nvidia with Linux. But Vulkan Video (Firefox 153+) finally gives Nvidia users a hardware-decoding path that doesn’t depend on the flaky VA-API shim, so this story may finally have a happy ending.

Also see Enable Hardware Video Acceleration (VA-API) For Firefox in Ubuntu 20.04 / 18.04 & Higher.