There is a good chance that at some point you have seen ” hardware acceleration ” options in various areas of your PC, such as the famous Google Chrome browser. Hardware acceleration can significantly improve performance if you have a powerful PC, but it is not without its problems and that is why it is sometimes necessary to disable it , which is precisely what we are going to teach you to do in this article.
Hardware acceleration is a term used to describe tasks that are downloaded to devices and hardware rather than software. By default, most applications base their operation on the processor, but for example when running advanced HTML5 graphics in an Internet browser, having a GPU that is specialized in this, why use the CPU?
The problems caused by hardware acceleration
Although the premise of hardware acceleration is very promising as it will help improve the graphics performance of the computer, it is not without problems and does not always work as well as it should, especially precisely in Internet browsers.
Here are the cases where you could potentially be forced to disable hardware acceleration:
- If your CPU is especially powerful but your graphics isn’t that powerful, throttle could be ineffective compared to letting the CPU take care of all the work. Also, if your hardware components are prone to overheating or damaged in any way, heavy use through hardware acceleration may be causing problems that you would not otherwise experience.
- Software designed to use hardware is not doing well or cannot perform stably compared to using only the CPU. This is the most common reason for having to disable this feature.
How to disable it on your PC
Disabling hardware acceleration may be necessary when your PC runs too slow for a certain task or when you receive errors or have problems. Generally, this happens on computers that are a bit old or have a very weak graphics card (especially integrated ones).
Before starting, you should know that not all PCs are enabled to use this acceleration. Modern PCs that use dedicated NVIDIA or AMD graphics do not have the ability to change the amount of acceleration used, that is, you can only activate or deactivate it, while other older PCs or with integrated graphics do allow you to modify the weight of the acceleration you want to enable.
To check, right-click on an empty space on your desktop and select “Display Settings.” In the window that opens, scroll all the way down and select “Advanced display settings”.
In the window that opens, select “Show display adapter 1 properties.”
In the window that opens, you should see a tab called “Troubleshooting” or “Troubleshoot.” If not (as in the example below) it means that you do not have the ability to adjust the amount of acceleration you want to apply.
If, on the other hand, this tab does appear, you will see a button called “Change settings”. When you click on it, a new window will open with a sliding bar in which you can modify the weight of the hardware acceleration, being able to select “Nothing” and “Complete” at the ends.
As we have mentioned before, in the event that this tab does not appear, it only means that you cannot modify the amount of acceleration you want to apply, but you can still deactivate it completely. To do this, go back to the previous step and select “Graphics Settings”.
In the window that opens you will be able to select whether you want to enable or disable hardware acceleration on your PC simply by clicking on it. It is not necessary to click on Accept, simply by clicking on this button you will have already activated or deactivated it depending on what you want to do.
Settings in individual applications
Despite the fact that in the previous step we have taught you how to disable hardware acceleration in a general way in the Windows system, many applications have an individual configuration in this regard that, be careful, has higher priority than the Windows configuration. A simple example of this is the Google Chrome browser, an example of one of the applications that causes the most problems and in which it is often necessary to disable it.
Doing so is quite simple: just click on the button with the three vertical dots to open the menu and select “Settings”. Here you have the option of typing “acceleration” in the settings search bar at the top, or scroll down, click on “Advanced settings” at the bottom and keep scrolling down until you find the setting, under the System menu.
In the Firefox browser the procedure is similar, although less direct: you must click on the menu button and enter Options. Scroll down to the Performance section, and there you must uncheck the option “Use recommended performance settings”. When you do this, you will see that the option to Use hardware acceleration when available appears, and you can uncheck it.
Finally, in the Microsoft EDGE browser the procedure is similar: click on the button with the three dots and select “Settings”. Select the System section on the left, and in the options that appear on the right uncheck the option “Use hardware acceleration when available”.
This is how hardware acceleration is disabled in the three main browsers, but remember that each application can have its individual options, so in each case you will have to find where the option to disable it is located. In the event that it does not have this option, then it will use the default option that you have configured in Windows, as we have taught you to do in the previous section.