Enhanced Video Experience: How Firefox 126 Leverages NVIDIA’s RTX Technology on YouTube

Firefox now offers the RTX Video enhancements that Chrome and Edge users have enjoyed for the past year. RTX Video enhancements are available in the Firefox 126 update but require an NVIDIA RTX GPU and a reasonably high-quality monitor or TV.

The RTX Video suite includes several AI-powered video enhancement technologies. In this case, the focus is Video Super Resolution and RTX Video HDR . Video Super Resolution converts 1080p video to 4K, while RTX Video HDR upgrades SDR video to colorful and contrast-rich HDR.

Obviously, these enhancements will only benefit users who own a 4K- or HDR-capable computer monitor. Still, as NVIDIA notes, approximately 90% of online video is low-res SDR. If you can take advantage of RTX Video enhancements, you’ll notice a nice boost in quality while watching videos on YouTube and other platforms.

I should reiterate that RTX Video HDR only works in browsers. You can’t use it across the Windows operating system as a whole, and NVIDIA offers a separate suite of video enhancement technologies for gaming . However, VLC currently supports NVIDIA Video Super Resolution, so it may gain RTX Video HDR at some point.

Along with RTX Video, the Firefox 126 release adds zstd content encoding (which should make Facebook load faster), AV1 hardware decode acceleration for the latest Macs, and a “Copy Without Site Tracking” option that strips tracking data from URLs in your clipboard. There are also some security and bug fixes, and Firefox has temporarily disabled its URL Paste Suggestion feature as it investigates a performance bug. You can see the full list of changes in Firefox 126 at the Mozilla website.

NVIDIA’s Video Super Resolution feature requires a 30- or 40-series RTX GPU, though RTX Video HDR works with all models of RTX graphics card. To enable these features, install the latest Firefox update (version 126), set up the latest GeForce RTX Game Ready Driver , and enable HDR in your Windows display settings. Once that’s done, open the NVIDIA Control Panel, navigate to “Adjust Video Image Settings,” click “RTX Video Enhancement,” and turn on both “Super Resolution” and “High Dynamic Range.”

Source: NVIDIA