Wait, what? I know that hw accelerated video decoding is generally not available on linux chrome, but I'm pretty sure that lots of other things are. From my chrome://gpu

    Canvas: Hardware accelerated
    CheckerImaging: Disabled
    Flash: Hardware accelerated
    Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated
    Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Hardware accelerated
    Compositing: Hardware accelerated
    Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
    Native GpuMemoryBuffers: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
    Rasterization: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
    Video Decode: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
    Video Encode: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
    WebGL: Hardware accelerated
    WebGL2: Hardware accelerated

But this is with an integrated GPU, so maybe things are different for discrete cards.