what's te advantage of angle in chromium?

[jpsollie]

I thought disabling anlge in chromium (use-gl=desktop) would improve performance, as it would talk to radeonsi directly
This, however, seems complletely wrong: when not using angle in chromium, the system load when playing videos is 33% higher. Due to the use of widevine, hardware playback is not possible.
so, how does this angle API work? what's it advantage over radeonsi in mesa?
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The power of Gentoo optimization (not overclocked): [img]https://www.passmark.com/baselines/V10/images/503714802842.png[/img]

[Tatsh]

ANGLE is mostly a wrapper for all APIs to map OpenGL calls on any platform. It works with OpenGL, Vulkan, D3D, Metal. It's just so Google can manage the intricacies in a separate library. For details go to chrome://gpu to see your own system's graphics quirks.

Nothing in Chrome is going to talk to your card directly (given that there's Mesa or equivalent somewhere in the chain, there's no exact definition of 'direct'). There are many paths the code takes before it gets to your graphics card, one being ANGLE.

You may want to try some flags in chrome://flags to improve performance.

[Tatsh]

Also, Widevine does not block hardware accelerated playback. It is just a software method to decrypt content, but the decrypted content can still be rendered with the GPU. Most websites that use Widevine are not going beyond 1080p, or even 720p, so hardware acceleration is not exactly necessary.

In the case of Linux, Gentoo does not patch Chromium to enable hardware decoding and Google does not support hardware decoding on Linux at all (except on the special ChromeOS build).