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How to Enable or Disable Hardware Acceleration in Google Chrome

Learn to enhance Google Chrome's performance or troubleshoot issues by enabling or disabling hardware acceleration. It helps optimize the browser rendering.

Google Chrome’s Hardware Acceleration feature enhances browser performance by delegating graphical tasks to the GPU. To enable or disable it, navigate to System settings, toggle ‘Use Hardware Acceleration when available’ switch per need. A browser restart will activate or deactivate the change. The option is not available on phone or tablet.

Customize Hardware Acceleration in Chrome browser

The Google Chrome browser is known for its notorious memory hogging and utilizing CPU power. However, there has been much improvement in the performance, and it’s on the overall system.

Google Chrome has the Memory Saver feature that essentially helps restore the system’s memory by cutting off the background tabs and activities. It also supports Efficiency Mode in Windows PC, which is similar to the memory saver.

However, when running on low memory, Chrome utilizes the system hardware to delegate the process. One such option is Hardware Acceleration, which typically uses the system’s Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) to render and process the intensive graphical task like rendering 3D web elements.

Using the hardware acceleration helps optimize Chrome’s performance, but it also leads to other browser errors like the page being unresponsive, slow and sluggish, etc. In such cases, we can use the hardware acceleration toggle button to turn on and off as a troubleshooting step to identify and resolve issues.

Customize Hardware Acceleration in Chrome

The hardware acceleration feature is only available on the computer version of Google Chrome. You will not find the option on phones or tablets. As mentioned, it delegates the system’s GPU to perform graphical-intensive tasks to optimize the browser’s performance.

Here are the steps to customize the hardware acceleration option in the Chrome browser:

  1. Launch Google Chrome on your computer.
  2. Click on the More vertical 3dots icon menu and select the Settings menu.
    Settings menu in Chrome browser on computer
  3. Switch to the System settings tab in the left side pane.
  4. Toggle switch for Use hardware acceleration when available option to Turn On or Off on hardware acceleration.
    Use hardware acceleration when available option under System settings in Chrome browser on Computer
  5. Click the Relaunch button to make the changes.

By default, the browser enables the hardware acceleration; however, you can turn it off using the kill switch per your need.

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Note: You might notice the performance lag with the Chrome browser after turning off acceleration if you’re running on low device memory.

Bottom Line

Google Chrome uses the system the hardware for website rendering and performance improvement.

The option is enabled by default. However, Chrome doesn’t utilize the hardware power all the time. It will only use the system hardware when necessary or run on low system memory.

The hardware acceleration feature is available only on the computer browser and not other device types. You can customize and fix the issue due to hardware acceleration with a toggle button switch under Chrome’s System settings.

Lastly, if you've any thoughts or feedback on How to Enable or Disable Hardware Acceleration in Google Chrome, then feel free to drop in below comment box. You can also report the outdated information.

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Kushal Azza

Kushal is a Bachelor of Engineering, a Certified Google IT Support Professional, and a Digital-Tech Geek. He has over a decade of experience solving tech problems, troubleshooting, and creating digital solutions. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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