How to disable hardware acceleration in Google Chrome

It’s great to have a web browser with a ton of features that you can trust. Once you get rooted in a browser, like Safari or Google Chrome, it’s hard to switch anywhere else. However, sometimes you may experience some browser issues that force you to switch to another. In that case, instead of moving to another location, maybe there are some settings that you can change in the current one to improve the situation. In this case, we will address hardware acceleration in the Google Chrome browser.

As one of the most popular web browsers out there, the Google platform serves millions of users every day. With so many people in the browser, it should come as no surprise when problems arise. Again, in this case, we are going to discuss hardware acceleration. But first, we have to define this option and how it could serve to be a problem.

What is hardware acceleration?

In the case of Google Chrome, hardware acceleration is when the browser places some of its graphically intensive tasks on the graphics card, ensuring that your hardware is taking most of the load. This is usually a good thing because your graphics card is designed for hard work. Also, bypassing tasks to your GPU, your CPU is available to do other things.

However, this is not a perfect solution to things. There is an infinite number of different software configurations, and everyone’s computer is different. Sometimes users report that hardware acceleration is making their device run slower than average. This could be a problem with the graphics card or the driver, but regardless, this means that they are better served with the option disabled.

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Disabling hardware acceleration can do a lot for your browser, including improving battery life and speeding up Chrome’s performance. Sometimes the cursor can lag on the screen or you can’t even open the links as fast as you want. Having it turned off could also fix these problems.

How to disable hardware acceleration in Google Chrome

If you think that hardware acceleration is the reason for your poor performance in Google Chrome, please follow these steps to fix the problem.

First of all, open your browser. Then go to Chrome and a drop-down menu will appear. Then select “Preferences”. From here, it will appear on the “Settings” page. Scroll down the Settings page and click “Show advanced settings.” Then scroll down even further to find the “Use hardware acceleration when available” option. Make sure it is not checked.

You will see next to it in parentheses that you will see (requires a restart of Chrome). Make sure you don’t have anything important open in your browser when doing this, as you’ll have to restart Chrome for the option to take effect.

Now that you have disabled hardware acceleration in Google Chrome, hopefully, your performance will be better. As mentioned, it is impossible to determine exactly what the problem may be here. However, if you notice a performance increase with this option unchecked, at least you know it worked.