Hardware acceleration of Chrome's Flash plugin

Question

Running Flash in Google Chrome drains my CPU massively:

I figured that the cause of this issue would be that hardware acceleration of flash is turned off. When I tried turning it by right clicking a flash application and selecting settings, this window popped up:

No hardware acceleration options can be found.

In Chrome, when I open about:gpu, I get to see this:

How do I turn hardware acceleration on in Flash or is there an alternative way of reducing the CPU usage?

Solution 1

You should check your about:gpu section in Chrome/ium. In older PC's HW Acceleration is disabled by default and you only can enable it by overriding the settings in the about:flags.

• Open the about:flags in your address bar
• Look for Override software redendering list
• Click "Enable"
• Restart Chrome/ium

You can also start chrome using chrome --ignore-gpu-blacklist but having to do so each time is not ideal.

Solution 2

Try LIBGL_DRI3_DISABLE=1 google-chrome --ignore-gpu-blacklist if you end up here looking for a solution on a version affected by a LibGL DRI bug on Linux.

Comments

[Braiam]

You should check this bug, this bug and this bug. Also, updated my answer with more verbose instructions.

[Wilf]

Thanks! This works for my problem that chromium gave the error libGL error: DRI3 Fence object allocation failure Operation not permitted, so no hardware acceleration at all was available. The method I had been using was to disable the GPU sandbox as described here (using chromium --ignore-gpu-blacklist --disable-gpu-sandbox), but your method doesn't generate the annoying warning banner :)

[ali_m]

That was useful, although I found that enabling Override software rendering list in about:flags is not sufficient to enable a lot of those features including HW accelerated video decoding. For some reason passing the flag via the command line using chromium-browser --ignore-gpu-blacklist seems to work.

[ali_m]

Seems to be related to this bug: code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=509336