Hardware acceleration is the process where an application shifts specific tasks from the CPU to a dedicated component in the system, like the GPU, to increase efficiency and performance.
When you run an application, the CPU handles most, if not all, tasks. Enabling hardware accelerationfrees theCPU usageas some tasks are shifted over to other components. This allows theCPU to perform other tasks.
This is an excellent feature on an application, and you might think it should always be kept on, right? Well, it depends.
Your specific systemmay or may not be able to utilize the performance boostfrom hardware acceleration fully. Enabling it may not always mean a smooth experience.
So, if it causes problems or doesn’t help your system, you may want toturn off hardware acceleration.
Hardware Acceleration On or Off?
Depending on your system, enabling hardware acceleration can boost or degrade your application performance.
Hardware acceleration primarily uses the GPU in your system. Enabling hardware acceleration on a system with a faster GPU and a slower CPU will likely result in a significant performance boost on applications.
This will alsolower your CPU usageand should alsolower the temperaturein case it is running hot.
But if you have a top-of-the-line CPU paired with a relatively slower GPU, the results are quite uncertain.
Users in multiple forums have reported that their performance increased after enabling hardware acceleration. But some have also reported a dip.
The performance change could alsodepend on the application that uses hardware acceleration.
For me,with an HP Intel i5 8th Gen laptop, web browsers like Chrome, Opera, or Mozilla did not run into any issues, and theapplication ran slightly better when hardware acceleration was enabled.
Enabling hardware acceleration on Discordalso gave an improved performance. There were no stuttering or lagging issues when playing/streaming videos or playing some light games in the browser.
I recommend that you try it for yourself once and figure out what works best for your configuration.
