Apr 17 2019 01:18 PM - edited Oct 31 2019 12:01 AM
In Edge Chromium Dev v74.1.96.24 I noticed that 1080p 60fps h.264/avc videos had framedrops that would not happen when playing those videos in Edge HTML or Internet Explorer 11. I did make sure that the codec is set to h.264/avc and that the video acceleration is on.
-These examples were from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeSR7pFSob4
-I tried it in both D3D9 and D3D11
-There were more framedrops when the videos were in fullscreen
-The frames dropped a lot more with SurfaceLayer Objects for Videos enabled
-I tried the same settings with Chrome Dev v75.0.3579.4 which gave similar results
-These are best case scenarios were the cursor is not moved which with that or a banner ad showing up, or a notification appearing would cause more framedrops
- With Edge HTML or Internet Explorer 11 there no framedrops even with moving the cursor
I noticed those issues when Youtube introduced hfr videos in 2015 and saw that there were framedrops in chrome when it did not happen with Internet Explorer 11 which is why I used that until Windows 10 and moved to EdgeHTML. I'm hoping that bringing this up early in the Edge Chromium devleopment would help to have optmizations happen sooner than later.
Apr 18 2019 02:32 PM
@382iou Here are a couple of more photos for system context.
The highest my GPU can decode is 1920*1080p 60fps h.264/AVC. Could it be the browser's Mojo Video Decoder?
Apr 19 2019 09:16 AM
Apr 19 2019 12:36 PM
Well done on the write up! For me the Video Acceleration performance is also no where near as fluid / not working properly compared to EdgeHTML.
The performance difference is quite serious and might not be evident on higher end dev machines so it might be of benefit if a guru at the MS performance team kindly manages to compare EdgeHTML with EdgeChromium on lower tier and switchable laptop devices.
For me it even seems like EdgeChromium is falling back to software video decoding. (no matter the flag settings).
Chrome behaves the same way for me and I hope MS will be able to get around to improving the acceleration aspects in the future. They did mention working on ANGLE in one of the blog posts.
Laptop (iGPU: Intel HD 3000, dGPU: ATI 6xxx m) dGPU doesn't get used at all and iGPU doesn't seem to be accelerating video and the general feel is slow.
EdgeChromium also feels rather sluggish on the Surface 5 Pro i5 compared to EdgeHTML.
Apr 19 2019 12:46 PM
Hi @382iou, thank you for this detailed write up. I will make sure that it gets to the right folks on the Edge team.
Apr 19 2019 02:47 PM
@382iou Thanks for reporting this issue with all the details. We have gone ahead and filed a bug and will start investigating it soon.
Apr 23 2019 04:44 PM
@Deleted @GurpreetV I did see in edge://gpu under Driver Bug Workarounds and Problems Detected that it disabled both dxgi_zero_copy_video and nv12_dxgi_video because of AMD drivers, but that dosen't explain how that is not an issue for either Internet Explorer 11 or EdgeHTML.
Apr 23 2019 05:54 PM
@VonCrisp @GurpreetV The thing about ANGLE is when I disabled D3D11 Video Decoder, Media Internal would show that it was using D3D11 for DXVA.
- But if I set ANGLE to D3D9, Media Internal would show D3D9 for DXVA
- Though with D3D11 Video Decoder enabled, D3D9 for DXVA would show but also the error for D3D11 config
- So when I did tests for D3D9 and D3D11 Video Acceleration I set the ANGLE grpahics backend to the corresponding D3D setting to make sure that was being used for DXVA
- And yes, setting ANGLE to D3D9 with D3D11 Video Decoder enabled and vice versa still resulted in framedrops
Oct 07 2019 09:12 AM
Honestly the whole hardware acceleration of Chrome/Chromium has been a bit of a mess for me and like you stated is totally tangled up and generally feels much slower than EdgeHTML.
Essentially this is why I always referred back to EdgeHTML on slower hardware.
Have there been any updates concerning this acceleration situation? Do you know if MS is looking at this?
Oct 07 2019 10:43 AM
Oct 30 2019 11:57 PM
It's similar with Edge Chromium Dev v.79.0308.1 64 bit
I'm using a different video because the other one is unavailable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vigX3H7WX5Q
Edge HTML and Internet Explorer 11 didn't drop a frame even when moving the cursor and quickly scrolling the up and down in battery mode
Hopefully whatever optimizations that are in Chrome Dev make it to Edge Chromium.
Aug 06 2020 06:00 AM - edited Aug 06 2020 06:11 AM
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.
Aug 06 2020 06:08 AM
Aug 07 2020 05:16 AM
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.
Aug 08 2020 03:27 AM