Oct 18, 2026, 3:32 PM@ell1e @nina_kali_nina the thing that terrifies me is the heaviweightness, splinteredness, and slop-centricness of any kind of video acceleration right now
- Oct 18, 2026, 3:32 PM
Replies
Oct 18, 2026, 3:37 PM@mcc @nina_kali_nina true, but i personally think 3d acceleration is overrated too.
I have WebGL disabled in my browser and I love software renderers! A ton of indie games could run just fine with a pure software renderer if they tried
(I realize others will consider 3d acceleration much more essential and that's fair, I suppose I have a privileged niche opinion)
- Oct 18, 2026, 3:52 PM
@ell1e @nina_kali_nina i feel like since last night i've been having a lot of baffling conversations with this comment from linux folks. i cannot stress how much you need 3d acceleration because you need 2d acceleration. do you ever *scroll a window*? then you need 2d acceleration
- Oct 18, 2026, 3:54 PM
@ell1e @nina_kali_nina ignore games. literally, don't worry about games for the moment, gamedevs will target whatever platform you put in front of them. software renderers stopped being good enough when screen sizes started being 1920x1080 and above
- Oct 18, 2026, 3:55 PM
@mcc @nina_kali_nina I mean it depends. My machines are fast enough that pure software is enough, in my experience even something like a Raspberry Pi 5 is typically fast enough to do snappy software rendered UIs for a Full HD screen. (I don't use 4K because it just draws way more power with little improvement.)
Source: I've tried it, I remove all acceleration from a ton of apps entirely. And I scroll around in windows! I know that some of them didn't have 2D acceleration either because I wrote them.
Nina Kalininanina_kali_nina@tech.lgbtOct 18, 2026, 4:11 PM@ell1e @mcc this doesn't mirror my experience; I have a relatively fast 12th gen i5 that can only do soft render on NetBSD, and it is a tad painful to use for scrolling things in browsers at FullHD, and almost completely unusable for watching videos (dropping the resolution helps, but it's not a reliable solution)
- Oct 18, 2026, 4:16 PM
@nina_kali_nina @mcc That's sad to hear! Perhaps I judged wrongly then.
But I wonder, when you say videos, do you mean Youtube?
Youtube is a horrible website that causes a ton of extra draw rather than just the video playback itself. I would personally rather blame that on Youtube than the local software stack.
Some things that can help are 1. disable Youtube's ambient mode, 2. use an aggressive adblocker, 3. use an external client like https://freetubeapp.io to actually get decent performance.
- Nina Kalininanina_kali_nina@tech.lgbtOct 18, 2026, 4:20 PM