Hardware acceleration is a technique wherein a program or application forces various hardware components to perform faster that the standard computing architecture to accomplish their job efficiently. One very common application which uses hardware acceleration is Google Chrome browser.
When hardware acceleration is enabled in Google Chrome it allows the browser to access the device graphic hardware to boost the process and improve the surfing experience. It passes most of the graphical intensive tasks such as games, playing video, etc. within the browser to the graphics processing unit. Bypassing such tasks that require faster mathematical calculations to the graphics processing unit, the CPU gets a chance to work on other tasks. It does sound promising, but many times users have reported that hardware acceleration is making their device run slower. There are unlimited numbers of software configurations and every system is different. Sometimes, hardware acceleration can cause the browser to crash and often causes the system’s battery to drain faster. That is why it is important to know if hardware acceleration is doing anything good for your computer or not.
You can also check if hardware acceleration is enabled in Google Chrome by typing chrome://gpu in the address bar.
You will get a result similar to this:
You can see that a majority of the items in the list above have hardware acceleration enabled.
If you are facing problems in displaying visual elements correctly or the cursor lags across the screen in the Google Chrome browser, then disabling hardware acceleration can probably fix it. You have the option to turn off hardware acceleration in Chrome. Here is how you can do it with a few simple steps:
Disable Hardware Acceleration through Google Chrome Settings
- Launch Google Chrome and go to the Menu by clicking on the three dot icon
- Go to “Settings” and scroll down to the bottom of the page to click on “Advanced” option
- Now, scroll down to the “System” option.
- There you can toggle “Use hardware acceleration when available” on or off
- Once done, restart your computer
**You can repeat the above steps to turn hardware acceleration back on.
How to Disable Hardware Acceleration in chrome via Registry in Windows
- Hit Windows + R to bring Run window
- Type in “regedit” in the box and hit “Enter”
- Now navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE —-SOFTWARE —-Policies —- Google —-Chrome
- Right-click on “Chrome”
- Choose “New”—- “DWORD 32-bit value”
- Keep value name as “HardwareAccelerationModeEnabled”
- You have to set value data to “0” to turn off Hardware Acceleration ( to turn in on-again, set the value to “1”)
- Restart your computer
Conclusion
Disabling hardware acceleration can improve your system’s battery life and the performance of the cursor too. If you had been facing constant issues with your browser, hopefully disabling hardware acceleration can make it perform better. If you notice a boost in the browser’s performance after turning off the hardware acceleration, then it means that it worked.
