Forum Discussion
Edge Chromium Video Acceleration Is Not As Good As EdgeHTML and Internet Explorer 11
I have an Intel N5000 with UHD Graphics 605. I compared graphics usage between edge and chrome and noticed some video streams in chromium (edge or chrome variant) don't even utilize the video decode and just a little bit of other graphics resources but not enough for smooth playback. EdgeHTML uses far better use of graphics resources including the video decode specifically and it guarantees smooth playback.
I only came back to this issue because there have been more streams on twitch.tv lately that my CPU just cannot handle in chrome. I had to revert Edge back to EdgeHTML and was able to get back smooth playback for these twitch streams. I can even run streams in both browsers simulateously and the EdgeHTML stream is still smooth. Flags in chrome do not help, latest intel graphics driver installed. The video engine in chromium is just bad. This is exactly why I disliked it back when Microsoft said they were switching to chromium. I knew they were going to sacrifice the good things about EdgeHTML rather than just making EdgeHTML better.
edit: I can see that the majority of twitch streams activate the video decode on my UHD 605 graphics. It just so happens the one stream that I watch the most (LCK) doesn't activate it and I don't know why it doesn't on chromium but does in EdgeHTML.
On “high end” systems these performance issues are hardly noticeable.
On low end systems it basically is a night and day difference.
The performance benefits would translate well across the board and make the browser more snappy.
There was one instance where it appeared Chrome and Firefox were doing a video stream better. This was tested on a system with a GTX 1070 and i7 processor, so video "should" be fine in any browser on this system. It was specifically with a video steam on hbo now, and I only tested the movie Fantastic Beasts 2. The video in EdgeHTML stuttered more than in chrome or firefox.
Also strange is that I couldn't get that LCK twitch stream to activate video decode on my GTX 1070, even in the EdgeHTML browser. It does activate the video decode on my laptop with Intel UHD 605, but on my desktop with the Nvidia card, I couldn't get the LCK twitch stream to activate video decode on any browser.
I've always felt a bit of unease with video playback in browsers. I only really fully trust offline content played in video players like VLC. No one ever seems to get it quite right with browsers, as there's always something wrong. So I keep multiple browsers installed and use the one that works depending on which website I use.
- Most of my video contents that I use are through browsers and I set my Intel IGPU to handle the browser video accelerations and I have never had any problems with videos. be it on Youtube 4K 60FPS, Twitch, direct link to a video file etc. latest Windows 10, latest Intel graphic drivers.
Core i7, DDR4 16GB RAM (at least)
