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sykaster @feddit.nl

Debian 12 Firefox games run terrible when i press buttons or use the mouse

Hi all,

I recently installed Debian 12 on my Lenovo Legion 5 Pro, and am using the GNOME desktop (x11). From time to time I play a game called survev.io . It's a browser battle royale game, not hard on graphics.

I have an Nvidia rtx3060 and have the proper drivers installed. I checked using nvidia-smi and Firefox is using the Nvidia gpu.

The issue is that the game runs smoothly until I press a button or move the mouse. Then the framerate decreases significantly and it becomes unplayable.

I already tweaked the following settings in Firefox to no avail:

  • gfx.webrender.all = True
  • enabled hardware acceleration
  • layers.acceleration.force-enabled = TRUE
  • gfx.x11-egl.force-enabled = true

And now I'm out of ideas. The game itself isn't too important to me, but other browser games do the same, so it's a wider issue I want to solve.

Any ideas on how to resolve this?

20 comments

  • Maybe your GPU is set to a low power mode? I wonder if something like CoreCtrl might help you.

    I don’t have this problem on my Debian 12 machines, which both use this browser on XFCE, but they have AMD graphics. Then again, I don’t online game that often, but when I have, I don’t recall any problems.

  • This comment won't fix it for you, but I can definitely relate to what you're saying. I've spent so much time optimizing my web games in a way that they run more-or-less consistently the same in any modern browser, it was probably as much work as it was put in the games themselves. I do maintain my own engine, so I was aware of the cost.

    The thing is, now Firefox is officially one of the last browsers employing their own rendering engine. The other one is probably Safari. I'm not aware of any others that do that. All other major browsers are using Chromium under the hood, and we know how this industry ruthlessly optimizes things for popularity. I won't delve into how many software layers of responsibility are involved in playing a video game in a web browser. My point is, if something is "passable" for a couple popular browsers, very few people will bother with checking why the less popular ones might have some sub-par performance.

  • The version of Firefox that ships with Debian is quite old if I recall. You might want to try installing it either as a flatpak or as a separate apt repo from Mozilla directly to see if that solves it.

    • Not necessarily. It’s currently on the latest ESR version. I use the repo version on my laptop (stable) and testing and don’t have this problem.

      In recent years, Debian has gotten a lot better about keeping stuff on the current ESR version.

20 comments