@Jasper :-
Mm. Yeah. With regard to the VAAPI stuff, it's probably not a lot of use until you get to the point in time where integrated GPUs began to move onto the CPU die, creating what were known at the time as APUs (Accelerated Processing Units).
I say this because, in all honesty, prior to that point integrated graphics chips were pretty simple beasts, supporting relatively few rendering pipelines (these are where VAAPI will "offload" stuff to). After the arrival of APUs, on-die GPUs began to develop quite fast, to the point where most were getting to be comparable in performance with an "average" bread'n'butter discrete (separate) card.
Most folks still use on-die or integrated graphics......with these, VAAPI is hardly worth enabling. Discrete GPUs are still not THAT common outside of the enthusiast communities, and certain "niche" communities that some manufacturers have 'created' to try and 'showcase' their products.
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I ended up with my own Nvidia card through circumstance. When I first got this HP desktop rig at the start of the pandemic, it only had 4 GB RAM.....and the on-die Intel GPU would claim a chunk of that. I'd just had several years of struggling with a mere 3 GB RAM, and no way was I going back to that. So the GT 710 was roughly equivalent to the Intel GPU in performance, but more importantly it had its own 2 GB of VRAM, so wouldn't 'poach' system RAM to use for its own devices.
As it happened, finances permitted me, during the course of that year, to upgrade the RAM to the point that, by year's end, 4 GB had 'morphed' into 32 GB (the max for this mobo).
I do use VAAPI with the Ungoogled Chromium portable build, because 'Marmaduke' has enabled it in his compile.....and the GT 710 has enough rendering engines to make it worthwhile.
Just my two-penn'orth, FWIW.
Mike.