How to enable Chrome / Chromium hardware acceleration in Ubuntu 18.04

For many Ubuntu users, the activity in front of their computer is limited to the web browser, a browser possibly Google Chrome or Chromium. It is also common to see or use YouTube to view videos or work as a YouTuber. For these tasks, If you do not have a powerful CPU, oddly enough, it can cause the CPU to start to be used disproportionately and spend more energy, resources and generate more heat.

Hopefully this will be fixed in the next versions of Chromium thanks to the enablement of the hardware acceleration of the web browser thanks to the use of the VA-Driver-API that will incorporate future versions of Chromium and its proprietary version, Google Chrome. We can already have this in our Ubuntu, but for this we will need to have the development version of Chromium.

Installation this version of Chromium we have to do it through an external repository. For this we write the following in the terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:saiarcot895/chromium-dev
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install chromium-browser

Once we install this version then we have to install the driver corresponding to our GPU for the web browser to use, a kind of complement. Unfortunately it only works for AMD and Intel GPUs, NVidia continues to have problems with their drivers and they do not have a plug-in for their graphics cards. If we have an Intel GPU, then we have to write the following in the terminal:

sudo apt install i965-va-driver

If we have a graphics card with an AMD GPU, then we have to write the following in the terminal:

sudo apt install vdpau-va-driver

But one thing is still missing: Tell Chromium to use hardware acceleration. For this we have to enter this address chrome: // flags / # enable-accelerated-video in the address bar and enable hardware acceleration. Once we have done this, then we restart Chromium and we will have the hardware acceleration enabled with the saving of resources and a better functioning of the web browser.