GPU Acceleration
Firefox Hardware Video Acceleration
Configuring the nvidia-vaapi-driver
VAAPI acceleration in Firefox on Debian 12 is tricky because many of the components are broken with fixes hiding in newer versions that have yet to be released through Debian's repositories.
I was only able to get this working by manually building and installing the following updated packages:
- nvidia-driver v570.169
- nvidia-smi v570.169 (comes with manually installed nvidia-driver)
- nvidia-vaapi-driver v0.0.14
Other packages used (installed through Debian 12 repository):
- firefox-esr v128.11
- vainfo v2.12
Once you have installed the packages above you can verify nvidia-vaapi-driver is working by running vainfo:
user@debian:~$ vainfo
libva info: VA-API version 1.17.0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/nvidia_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_0
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.17 (libva 2.12.0)
vainfo: Driver version: VA-API NVDEC driver [direct backend]
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
VAProfileMPEG2Simple : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileMPEG2Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Simple : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVC1Advanced : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264Main : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264High : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVP8Version0_3 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVP9Profile0 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileAV1Profile0 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain10 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain12 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileVP9Profile2 : VAEntrypointVLD
VAProfileHEVCMain444 : VAEntrypointVLD
Here we are looking to see that the driver has loaded without errors and that we are using the [direct backend]. If the driver is defaulting to the[egl backend] you can force it to use direct by setting the following environment variable:
export NVD_BACKEND=direct
Configuring Firefox
Before launching Firefox I recommend setting the following environment variable in your terminal to enable NV logging:
export NVD_LOG=1
Now launch Firefox using the following parameters:
MOZ_DISABLE_RDD_SANDBOX=1 firefox
In Firefox you will need to set the media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled option to true in the about:config page:
Now close Firefox and restart using the same command. To verify that video hardware decoding is working you can play a YouTube video and check the output of nvidia-smi:
user@debian:~$ nvidia-smi Fri Jun 20 19:14:17 2025 +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | NVIDIA-SMI 570.169 Driver Version: 570.169 CUDA Version: 12.8 | |-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+ | GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC | | Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. | | | | MIG M. | |=========================================+========================+======================| | 0 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Off | 00000000:06:00.0 On | Off | | 0% 38C P2 80W / 450W | 1090MiB / 24564MiB | 5% Default | | | | N/A | +-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+ +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Processes: | | GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory | | ID ID Usage | |=========================================================================================| | 0 N/A N/A 989 G /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg 317MiB | | 0 N/A N/A 33599 G alacritty 29MiB | | 0 N/A N/A 40272 G ...ler --variations-seed-version 48MiB | | 0 N/A N/A 42045 G alacritty 15MiB | | 0 N/A N/A 49174 G alacritty 15MiB | | 0 N/A N/A 52330 G firefox-esr 130MiB | | 0 N/A N/A 55294 C+G /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr 423MiB | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
We are looking for a Firefox process with a Type or either C or C+G.
You can also use nvidia-smi pmon to show the usage of the decode engine:
user@debian:~$ nvidia-smi pmon
# gpu pid type sm mem enc dec jpg ofa command
# Idx # C/G % % % % % % name
0 49174 G - - - - - - alacritty
0 52330 G 0 0 - - - - firefox-esr
0 55294 C+G 1 0 - 4 - - firefox-esr
0 989 G 1 0 - - - - Xorg
0 33599 G - - - - - - alacritty
0 40272 G - - - - - - chrome --type=g
0 42045 G - - - - - - alacritty
I had to bump up the video quality to 1080p@60 for it to show a usage greater than 0%.