Does this work on NVideo GPU or AMD gpu

[Asif-Iqbal-Bhatti]

Hello,

I would like to ask, as I see this is mostly rendering done on CPU. I am not able to run on GPU, whether NVIDIA or AMD, on Windows or HPC.

Regards,
Asif

[samohovets]

Hi Asif, what are you trying to do, and what isn't working?

Remotion renders frames in headless Chrome. The GPU only speeds this up for WebGL, Three.js and heavy CSS effects such as filter or box-shadow. Encoding the video on the GPU is a separate feature. See Using the GPU and Hardware acceleration.

Please share the command you ran and the output of npx remotion gpu.

[Asif-Iqbal-Bhatti]

Hi, thanks for the quick reply. Here are the details.

What I want to do: Render a 4K (3840×2160, 24 fps) video faster using the GPU. Remotion is rendering it from a
React project that uses SVG, CSS and map graphics, with no WebGL or Three.js.

Setup

• OS: Windows 11 with WSL2, Ubuntu 24.04. I'm not on an HPC cluster.
• GPU: NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada, 8 GB. The Windows driver is 596.58 and WSL sees it through /dev/dxg. nvidia-smi
  works inside WSL.
• Remotion: 4.0.540 (@remotion/cli, renderer and bundler).
• Node: 22.
• Browser: chrome-headless-shell from Playwright, passed as browserExecutable.

What I ran: renderMedia() with codec: 'h264', scale: 2, concurrency: 12 and a chromiumOptions block of {
enableGpu: true, args: ['--enable-gpu-rasterization', '--ignore-gpu-blocklist', '--enable-zero-copy'] }. I also
set hardwareAcceleration: 'required' with videoBitrate: '24M'. I did not set gl, and remotion.config.ts has
setChromiumOpenGlRenderer('swangle').

How I can tell the GPU isn't used for frame rendering

• npx remotion gpu fails with Browser failed to load chrome://gpu/ (Document): net::ERR_FAILED. This happens
  with --gl=swangle, angle, vulkan and egl. I think headless-shell has no chrome:// pages.
• I also loaded a small WebGL page directly in headless-shell and printed the UNMASKED_RENDERER_WEBGL string:
  • --use-angle=vulkan reports llvmpipe, which is CPU software rendering.
  • --use-angle=swiftshader reports SwiftShader, also CPU.
  • gl-egl, gl, d3d11 and --use-gl=egl fail with No suitable EGL configs found or Initialization of all (0) EGL
    display types failed. I tried this with GALLIUM_DRIVER=d3d12 and MESA_D3D12_DEFAULT_ADAPTER_NAME=NVIDIA
    set.
• /usr/share/vulkan/icd.d has no NVIDIA ICD, and vulkaninfo isn't installed. That would explain why Chrome
  never reaches the RTX.

What does use the GPU: NVENC encoding. h264_nvenc works (I tested a 4K encode with ffmpeg). I believe
hardwareAcceleration: 'required' makes Remotion pick h264_nvenc on Linux.

My questions

1. Is it expected that Chrome in WSL2 can't use the NVIDIA GPU for GL, so the only GPU speed-up is NVENC
   encoding? Or is there a supported flag combination for WSL2?
2. Does Remotion's bundled ffmpeg include h264_nvenc, or does it need a system ffmpeg?
3. For a non-WebGL composition, is there any benefit to --gl=angle over swangle?

[samohovets]

Thanks for the details, this helps a lot.

Making Chrome use the GPU inside WSL2 is outside of what Remotion controls, but it is possible. First get a regular Google Chrome or Chromium inside WSL to report hardware acceleration on chrome://gpu. You can ask a coding agent to debug this against chrome://gpu. It may need to install drivers, add Chrome flags, or create a wrapper script that launches Chrome with those flags.

Once chrome://gpu looks good, point Remotion at it. Set browserExecutable to that Chrome or to the wrapper script. Set chromiumOptions.gl to null so that Remotion doesn't add its own --use-gl and --use-angle flags.

enableGpu and args are not options of chromiumOptions, so Chrome never received the flags in your config. For now, a wrapper script that passes your flags plus "$@" is the way to add custom flags.

To your questions:

1. It's expected until Chrome itself can use the GPU in WSL2. We don't have a flag combination to recommend for WSL2, because it depends on the drivers.
2. Yes. The FFmpeg that ships with Remotion on Linux x64 includes h264_nvenc and hevc_nvenc. Render with logLevel: 'verbose' and look for Encoder: h264_nvenc, hardware accelerated: true.
3. Not while Chrome has no GPU access, because angle then falls back to software rendering too. With a working GPU, SVG and CSS rasterization can get faster. Measure it, because taking screenshots of 4K frames also takes time.