Wiki: Chromium-Based Browsers HW Acceleration out of date?

Feedback Wiki
1

Hi there. While browsing the wiki I came across this page for enabling GPU acceleration in Chromium browsers:

The page immediately launches into creating and configuring flag files and provides user-supplied templates for working configs.

However! The equivalent Arch wiki page here states that Chromium GPU acceleration should work out of the box since v143.

I have tested my setup and appear to have working acceleration without doing anything (running Chromium 147):

Graphics Feature Status
=======================
*   Canvas: Hardware accelerated
*   Direct Rendering Display Compositor: Disabled
*   Compositing: Hardware accelerated
*   Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
*   OpenGL: Enabled
*   Rasterization: Hardware accelerated
*   Raw Draw: Disabled
*   Skia Graphite: Disabled
*   TreesInViz: Disabled
*   Video Decode: Hardware accelerated
*   Video Encode: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
*   Vulkan: Enabled
*   WebGL: Hardware accelerated
*   WebGPU: Hardware accelerated
*   WebGPU interop: Hardware accelerated
*   WebNN: Disabled

Version Information
===================
Data exported              : 2026-05-01T00:30:42.573Z
Chrome version             : Chrome/147.0.7727.137
Operating system           : Linux 7.0.2-2-cachyos
Software rendering list URL: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/68ba233a543d25e75c30f1228dd3bafa2da96937/gpu/config/software_rendering_list.json
Driver bug list URL        : https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/68ba233a543d25e75c30f1228dd3bafa2da96937/gpu/config/gpu_driver_bug_list.json
ANGLE commit id            : 534e0d1c1d0f
2D graphics backend        : Skia/147 6e0fbe154ccaf018b2dd1f0e42eec285e7d79d00
Command Line               : /usr/lib/chromium/chromium --flag-switches-begin --flag-switches-end --ozone-platform=wayland --render-node-override=/dev/dri/renderD128

Does the CachyOS wiki need updating?

2

You might want to fiddle around in “about:flags”. I would recommend you use Chrome canary instead, it is updated very frequently where the newest changes are tested by google developers.

Below command in terminal to get the latest (as of writing) version

cd google-chrome-canary/
sed -i “s/^pkgver=.*/pkgver=149.0.7819.0/” PKGBUILD && makepkg -sic --skipchecksums --noconfirm

And then same command just increment the version number to update, you can check the latest canary version at Chromium Dash

this was the best I could do on my hardware (broadwell) as its pretty old and certain features arent supported yet plus I use a Wayland based DE (cosmic) which the new chrome rendering library (skia graphite) does not support yet.

image
image503×334 34 KB

Let me know if you need any help to configure about:flags.

3

Thanks, but I’m not asking for help to get HW acceleration working, I’m suggesting it works out of the box (per the Arch wiki) and providing feedback that the CachyOS wiki needs updating accordingly.

The only additional thing I did is documented here to get HW accelerated encoding working as well.

To enable accelerated encoding in Chromium:

Append the AcceleratedVideoEncoder feature, e.g. 

--enable-features=AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL,AcceleratedVideoEncoder

Chromium 147
Intel Arc B580 (xe driver)
KDE/Wayland

image
image394×316 40.3 KB

4

ah I see, I only had the video encode switch turned on although maybe not necessary as i’ve come to learn the right combination of flags would trigger acceleration.