I’m working with a completely new setup, moving from an Intel 13900k to an AMD 9950x3D2. The GPU remained a RTX 5080 but since the move (and a fresh OS install), RTX video enhancements won’t seem to enable anymore. All drivers are up to date, I disabled the iGPU so there’s no longer any distinction on which GPU runs what. Enabled hardware rendering and RTX video enhancement. Both on Prime and Youtube, the video enhancement seems to enable for a second, then the whole page visibly reloads a couple times, resumes video playback, and RTX video enhancements revert to Inactive. If I had to guess, something crashes in Chrome’s render engine and it reverts to some fallback mechanic, software rendering maybe. Anyone ever seen this?
So, after noticing that Chrome was clearly struggling refreshing the video fast enough if the scene changes a lot, I did the opposite, reactivated the iGPU and forced Chrome to run on that.
While there was nothing visible on the Task Manager GPU performance charts while Chrome was playing a video on the dedicated RTX, now there was some work done on the iGPU while the video was playing. So I conclude three things:
- Chrome and Edge (thus probably Chromium) both have problems with hardware playback on the dedicated GPU. It seems like they are reverting to software playback
- RTX video enhancements have no chance to work because the driver fails to initialize said playback/video decoding/w/e.
- The issue seems to be on Nvidia’s side. The AMD iGPU has no issues.
I can also point out these additional points:
- The CPU is undervolted. I reverted everything in a test to see if that has anything to do with it but the answer is no.
- The (RTX) GPU runs on stock settings. At least w/e that means for an ASUS ROG Astral. No additional overclocking, undervolting or anything.
- Both the CPU and (RTX) GPU perform admirably in every other task so far. Benchmarks are on the upper end of where they are supposed to be. Benchmarks and games run without crashing. I can enable features in the Nvidia APP and those also work flawlessly.
So, after Copilot sent me on a wild goose chase, I eventually tried completely reinstalling the OS. That, coupled with gradually restoring my previous setup led me to one definite reason and a second I do not understand:
- Years ago, when I still had an ultra-wide screen, I used a chrome extension to cut away the black borders if they were included in the stream. A common problem to this date. Less common was the fact that this extension required chrome to be started with --disable-direct-composition-video-overlays. I never quite understood what that did and I also don’t know why this caused no issue on the Intel setup, nor the AMD iGPU. But it definitely caused the software fallback on the RTX+AMD setup.
- While that explains the Chrome issues, it does not explain why it also happened on Edge which did not have this flag. I can assume at this point that something in the OS broke somewhere along the way and a fresh installation fixed it.
Some things I found along the way:
- I could verify it indeed falls back to software. That was not just a visual guess. I could see it in the chrome://media-internals/ page. While I did not verify the same on Edge, it looked very much the same, including the one-second RTX video enhancement, then complete page reload, then no enhancements.
- Playback worked fine in other programs such as VLC Media Player
- The issue happened both on DRM Prime and non-DRM Youtube, so the now-deleted intermittent Copilot-generated suggestion I posted (that it was due to some now missing Intel SGX media path) is defo not the reason even if possible.
- There were no issues apparent in GPU-Z. Everything was as it was supposed to be.
- Backdating the driver or moving to the Studio version did not change anything.
Thank you for the detailed analysis and fix! I appreciate that!
And a belated welcome to the NVIDIA developer forums.
Usually RTX Video topics are discussed as part of the NVIDIA App in the GeForce forums.