Only yesterday, I mentioned one of the main reasons I decided to switch back to Fedora from OpenBSD were performance issues – and one of them was definitely the lack of hardware acceleration for video decoding/encoding. The lack of such technology means that decoding/encoding video is done using the processor, which is far less efficient than letting your GPU do it – which results in performance issues like stuttering and tearing, as well as a drastic reduction in battery life.
Well, that’s changed now. Thanks to the work of, well, many, a major commit has added hardware accelerated video decoding/encoding to OpenBSD.
Hardware accelerated video decode/encode (VA-API) support is beginning to land in #OpenBSD -current.
libva has been integrated into xenocara with the Intel userland drivers in the ports tree. AMD requires Mesa support, hence the inclusion in base.
A number of ports will be adjusted to enable VA-API support over time, as they are tested.
↫ Bryan Steele
This is great news, and a major improvement for OpenBSD and the community. Apparently, performance in Firefox is excellent, and with simply watching video on YouTube being something a lot of people do with their computers – especially laptops – anyone using OpenBSD is going to benefit immensely from this work.
Well worth a try, if you are on AMD or Intel. I use to keep a dual graphics laptop with Intel and discrete Nvidia for BSD playing, it was a legacy of studying astronomy and crunching data using the GPU. But even when Nvidia was supported the peculiarities of the hardware management made reliability a nightmare, forced the hardware to default to one or the other at times would not work at all.
Hell to the yes! Video performance in web browsers has been one of the few pain points that keep me on Void Linux instead of OpenBSD for my daily workstation (though I do have a laptop and a tablet that run OpenBSD exclusively, as well as a small server). Time to sysupgrade -s one of those and get to testing!