If you are a web app user you might have heard of a term called Hardware Acceleration. In short, it means that your app will offload some of the tasks for other hardware components to be able to function more smoothly.
Several apps require much more than RAM to work smoothly, and web browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox are few examples.
This post will explain to you what hardware acceleration is, as well as how to enable or disable chrome hardware acceleration. If you are interested in this query, then keep reading.
What do you mean by hardware acceleration?
Usually, hardware acceleration refers to the execution of some processing which usually 3D graphics processing that is performed on specialist hardware on the GPU rather than in software on the main CPU.
Enabling hardware acceleration allows the CPU to offload some page-rendering and loading tasks to your computer’s GPU. More specifically, this method is to get better performance by moving some tasks from the CPU to the GPU of your computer.
Google Chrome hardware acceleration feature enables the web browser to access the device graphics hardware to speed up the entire processes and thus improve Chrome’s performance on your PC.
Most of the graphical intensive tasks within the browser will be passed to the GPU when Chrome hardware acceleration has been enabled. In this case, it can make the most of your hardware system. In the way, the overall performance of the web browser can be thus improved.
So, if you want to improve chrome’s performance of your system then you should always enable the hardware acceleration of google chrome.
How to check the status of hardware acceleration?
Before you move to turn hardware acceleration on or off, you need to check its status. To do so, you need to:
- Firstly, Open Google Chrome browser.
- Now, you need to Type “chrome://gpu” in the address bar on the top.
- Then, Press on ‘Enter’ to go to the location.
After you have executed the command, google chrome should display a list of different data about the software. You should only pay attention to the ‘Graphics Feature Status’ section for hardware acceleration.
You need to check the items under Graphics Feature status. You should see most functions under it are Hardware-accelerated if hardware acceleration has been enabled.
You should enable Chrome hardware acceleration if it is not enabled. You might wonder how to enable hardware acceleration on chrome? Well, the following method will show you some detailed steps.
How to turn on hardware acceleration in Chrome?
You can turn on hardware acceleration in chrome by following the below-mentioned steps:
- Firstly, click on the ‘More’ button which is three vertical dots available on the top-right of your Chrome window.
- Now, from the drop-down menu select ‘Settings’.
- Then, Click on the ‘Advanced’ menu that is available at the bottom.
- Now, under the ‘System’ section toggle on ‘Use hardware acceleration when available’.
- If Google Chrome notifies you that it needs to be restarted, you should just close all the tabs and then relaunch it.
- Then, in the address bar type “chrome://gpu”.
You should check if most of the items under the ‘Graphics Feature Status’ have ‘Hardware accelerated’ value.
Why is there a need to disable it?
Like all programs have some issue, hardware acceleration doesn’t always function as smoothly as it should. Here are the reasons why you should probably disable hardware acceleration on chrome:
If your CPU is quite strong and your other components are not, acceleration may prove to be ineffective in comparison to just leaving the powerhouse to take care of things. Moreover, if your computer’s components are very much prone to overheating or are damaged in any way, intensive use through hardware acceleration of system may cause problems you wouldn’t experience otherwise.
The software that is designed to utilize the hardware might not do well or can’t run as stable as it does when using only the CPU. This is quite a common and valid reason to disable hardware acceleration in an app’s options.
How to disable hardware acceleration in Google Chrome?
Within the chrome’s advanced settings the hardware acceleration feature is found. To do disable chrome hardware acceleration, you must enter the browser’s Configuration options from the menu or type “chrome: // settings /” in the space given in the address bar. In this new window, you need to scroll to the bottom of the browser, and then expand the advanced configuration options.
Now, keep scrolling down until you find the “System” section, and here you will already find the option saying ” Use hardware acceleration when available “.
Here, you are simply required to uncheck the box that appears next to this option to disable this hardware acceleration. Chrome will ask you to restart the browser for the changes to come into effect. Then restart manually, or from the button that appears next to the option after you deactivate it, and that’s it.
From now on, Google Chrome will function without the hardware acceleration option. With the benefits and the damages, that this causes.
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Using a shortcut
If you do not want to modify Chrome’s settings, there is yet another way to temporarily disable the hardware acceleration feature. To disable it, what you have to do is to locate the shortcut to Chrome, then right-click on it and launch the “Properties” window.
In the destination section, you should simply add the following parameter: – disable-gpu.
In this way, when you run the web browser from this shortcut, it will directly open with the said function disabled. In case you wish to reactivate it, you can do so easily by removing said shortcut from the browser parameters.
Even, you can have two shortcuts one with the GPU acceleration and one without it.
How to see if hardware acceleration helps?
Now, you may ask how to check whether this helps? Well, there exists a nice web site developed by Mozilla that performs a demonstration of the graphic potential of web browsers. This website also works perfectly well on Google Chrome. Here, you can also check your 2D and 3D animated performance, the draggable videos, SVG-embedded media or HD movies, etc.
So, this was our guide on how to enable or disable chrome hardware acceleration on your system. We believe, this has proved to be useful for you!
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