I'm having troubles getting hardware acceleration support for Youtube.
Both Windows and flash player are enabled for hardware acceleration. The drivers for the graphics card are installed.
The statistics in Youtube still show 'software video decoding'.
How can I confirm that hardware acceleration is correctly working (if at all) in Windows 7?
I'm using: Chrome, Ati Radeon HD 3450 AGP
You can use following URL to check if GPU acceleration is enabled for video decode in Chrome:
chrome://gpu/
Graphics Feature Status
Canvas: Hardware accelerated
Compositing: Hardware accelerated on all pages and threaded
3D CSS: Hardware accelerated
CSS Animation: Accelerated and threaded
WebGL: Hardware accelerated
WebGL multisampling: Hardware accelerated
Flash 3D: Hardware accelerated
Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated
Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Hardware accelerated
Texture Sharing: Hardware accelerated
Video Decode: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
Video: Hardware accelerated
Problems Detected
Accelerated video decode interferes with GPU blacklist on older Intel drivers: 180695
The overview on chrome://gpu/ is unreliable. If there's an error on initializing hardware acceleration, Chrome quietly falls back to software decoding despite it still saying "Hardware accelerated" on the GPU page. A better method is to open chrome://media-internals/ while playing a YouTube video. Then click the button that's captioned with 'blob' and the video URL. In the table below, look for the value of kVideoDecoderName or video_decoder. If it says MojoVideoDecoder or GpuVideoDecoder, Chrome is using the GPU. If it says anything else, for example FFMpegDecoder, it's using software decoding. Also, at the very bottom of the page, it will sometimes log some error messages regarding GPU video decoding.
This was tested with Chrome 84.0.4147.
As of April 2021, chrome://media-internals/ is deprecated and will be removed in the near future. Instead, @kolypto 's comment is where the feature has moved to. Simply open up a page with a video player, hit F12 to open Dev Tools, and open up Media tab like so:
If you press Shift + Esc while in the browser it will bring up Google Chrome's internal Task Manager. If there is a process titled GPU Process, then that means Chrome is using hardware/GPU acceleration in order to display/render a particular page.
The Radeon HD3000 series are too old to support modern GPU video decoding via DxVA.
See here
The 3000 series parts are either "UVD" or "UVD+". You need UVD2 or later to use GPU decoding feature of Chrome/Firefox/VLC/etc. You may still have 3d accelerated graphics, but your GPU does not have the hardware parts to run modern GPU decoding.
Also, AMD has stopped releasing feature update drivers for the HD3000 series GPUs. They were deprecated a long time ago. HD4000 series is also deprecated. The oldest GPU you can use nowadays and receive up-to-date drivers (including new features, improved performance, etc.) is the Radeon HD5000 series, "Evergreen". That's two generations newer than the one you have.
Finally, there is a diagnostic tool (freeware/donationware) written specifically to evaluate your DxVA (DirectX Video Acceleration) situation, meaning, which API level is supported (if any) by your driver/hardware combination, and it will even tell you if you support the feature level required by Adobe Flash.
It's called DXVA Checker.
YouTube uses VP9 format on Chrome and hardware accelerated decoding for VP9 is not supported on older chips. If your GPU or APU supports h264, you can use h264ify Chrome extension to force YouTube to play h264 videos and possibly benefit from hardware accelerated decoding.
VP9 is a newer format so and it offers better quality on the same bandwidth. If your CPU can't handle HD videos when you use software decoding with VP9, then using h264 with hardware acceleration may solve the problem.
