Hi, I just made this account to post about this really important issue since it’s been bothering me ever since I’ve installed this OS!
Basically, every time i play a video (including youtube) my pc starts to have serious slowdowns, for example input delays on certain apps or insane FPS drops on certain games (ranging from 10 to 40 FPS drops)
For reference, I’m using EOS Mercury from 2025.02.08, I have nothing else running intensively, and here’s a list of information about my PC: https://0x0.st/8e76.txt
Update your system first , because the latest kernel is 6.13.8 and plasma already on 6.3.3
This is a rolling distro so you should update at least once or twice a month.
To be honest, I’ve watched the video and I can’t really see what issue you’re facing. At least it isn’t obvious to me.
And based on your system report, I can only chime in with the others to encourage you the update to the latest package releases. Furthermore, I see that you’ve installed 45 flatpak packages in total. And I wonder why that is ? Did you use KDE’s discover exclusively to install new applications instead of pacman / yay ?
Go into the terminal and run Firefox with debug output:
MOZ_LOG="FFmpegVideo:5" firefox
Start the video and pause it after some seconds. Now look inside the terminal, if there are strings that have “VA-API” inside. Come back and share your results. If the strings are not to be found, you need to enable hardware acceleration following this guide.
Also it could be that your GPU doesn’t support decoding the specific video. But that’s something we look at later, after you post your findings.
Edit:
Also you could share the output of the command vainfo, so we know what codecs you can decode. You may need to install the package libva-utils for that.
What exactly is the issue? I do not understand that video. You watch a 4K movie on youtube and in a separate window you show a rotating cube. And it always has 120 fps, with 0 % on the GPUs.
So what is the issue?
At the end of the video you show the h264ify extension is enabled. But your screen shows 0 % usage on the GPUs. THat means that h264 is not using any hardware acceleration. What happens if you turn this extension off?
I agree with @I0F
Have you set up hardware acceleration and accelerated video decoding as per the arch wiki. You need to set it up and verify it’s working. It requires installation of some packages and setting some environmental variables and then verifying that it works.
Hello! So sorry for late reply! I didn’t expect this forum to be so active
Thank you all for replying to my forum post. The solution turned out to just be the hardware acceleration not being enabled, which is kind of embarrassing on my part…
To answer a few questions:
Update your system first , because the latest kernel is 6.13.8 and plasma already on 6.3.3
This is a rolling distro so you should update at least once or twice a month.
I’ve honestly never thought of that, I’m used to thinking that system updates barely happen, and I also stopped using sudo pacman -Syu since i had an issue with the bootloader suddenly vanishing and having to repair it…
Furthermore, I see that you’ve installed 45 flatpak packages in total. And I wonder why that is
I’ve only installed a few packages under flatpak, other packages were preinstalled as flatpaks and I’m not sure why myself.. (here’s my flatpak list https://0x0.st/8eCb.txt)
What exactly is the issue? I do not understand that video. You watch a 4K movie on youtube and in a separate window you show a rotating cube. And it always has 120 fps, with 0 % on the GPUs.
So what is the issue?
At the end of the video you show the h264ify extension is enabled. But your screen shows 0 % usage on the GPUs. THat means that h264 is not using any hardware acceleration. What happens if you turn this extension off?
I forgot to show in the video that I was running a Youtube video on 1080p. The spinning cube was meant to show the FPS dropping on 3D rendering (such as games), and Mangohud doesn’t properly show GPU stats due to me having an iGPU. The end was also meant to show that I had no extensions enabled and disabling h264ify made the performance drop even worse.
In the end, it seems that my inexperience with Linux got the best of me. I really apologize for anyone who had to deal with my stupidity, but hopefully I won’t have to nag this forum for any more answers…
Arch/EndeavourOS is rolling. Sometimes there are updates available several times a day. I believe the best schedule is to update at least once per week.
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong here, But I don’t believe that EndeavourOS preinstalls any flatpak packages.
EXAMPLE: This is the entirety of my flatpak list…
❯ flatpak list
Name Application ID Version Branch Installation
Discord com.discordapp.Discord 0.0.89 stable system
Flatseal com.github.tchx84.Flatseal 2.3.0 stable system
Warehouse io.github.flattool.Warehouse 2.0.2 stable system
Freedesktop Platform org.freedesktop.Platform freedesktop-sdk-24.08.16 24.08 system
Mesa org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default 24.3.4 24.08 system
Mesa (Extra) org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default 24.3.4 24.08extra system
Intel VAAPI driver org.freedesktop.Platform.VAAPI.Intel 24.08 system
openh264 org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264 2.5.1 2.5.1 system
GNOME Application Platform version 47 org.gnome.Platform 47 system
Breeze GTK theme org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Breeze 6.3.3 3.22 system
Upscayl org.upscayl.Upscayl 2.15.0 stable system
Main Menu page.codeberg.libre_menu_editor.LibreMenuEditor 1.9.1 stable system
❯
@Frakits, you also have a lot of old packages in your flatpak list. You should run flatpak uninstall --unused to get rid of old, unnecessary flatpak packages.
