I've spent days going over this and dont feel any closer to an answer. Some places tell me this is possible, some tell me it's not. Some tell me it was possible in the past, some tell me it's never been possible ever.

I have an old office PC that I threw a GPU into to use as a cloud gaming tower. The card is an Nvidia GeForce 635 which is still supported by the legacy 470 drivers. I have installed the drivers on mint and verified that it works with mpv and a few games. No problems with the card or the driver.

I can not get video acceleration working in chromium no matter what I try. I've appended --enable-features=AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxZeroCopyGL,AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL,VaapiIgnoreDriverChecks,VaapiOnNvidiaGPUs to chromium and verified that says I have working video acceleration and chrome://gpu says h264 is able to be decoded. The streaming service I use, GeForce NOW, streams in h264. The video is not accelerated and I get dropped frames like crazy, it's clearly not hardware acclerated and nvidia-x-server-settings confirms this, saying I have 0% video engine utilization when a video is playing in chromium. I have also tried installing the nvidia-vaapi-driver and testing out Firefox but have had no luck here either.

I am tearing my hair out trying to get this to work but have reached the limit of my understanding. If anyone could point me in the right direction I would appreciate it. Thank you.