It is possible to activate or deactivate the acceleration from hardware on Chrome, this function is able to take advantage of the GPU of our computer to be able to accelerate certain processes and free up the CPU a bit. The only problem is that on some occasions it can generate driver incompatibilities that can cause it to malfunction, so in mentioned cases it is better to disable the function.
What is hardware acceleration?
Basically, it refers to when a program uses the hardware of a computer as support to perform specific functions in the most efficient way possible and better than with software. The hardware was designed to do these functions faster than software that runs only on the GPU. Next, we are going to see exactly what steps we must follow to enable or disable hardware acceleration in Chrome.
Enable or disable hardware acceleration
By default, hardware acceleration is enabled in Chrome. Therefore, we are going to proceed to disable it first.
We start Chrome and we will have to click on the icon with the three dots at the top right and press “Settings” among all the options. Alternatively, we can write in the browser “Chrome: // settings /” without the quotes.
In the configuration menu, we will have to expand the “Advanced” drop-down section found in the left sidebar, then we will have to select “System”.
We will have to look for the option “Use hardware accelerator when available” and we will click the switch so that it is gray. After this we will have to click on “Relaunch” to restart Chrome.
Likewise, if we have things pending in the browser and we want to wait to restart it on our own, we can close the tab and restart it later.
In order to confirm that it was completely deactivated, we will write “chrome: // gpu /” without the quotes in the address bar and press “Enter”. When we disable hardware acceleration, most items in “Graphics function status” will appear as “Software only, hardware acceleration disabled”.
Obviously, if we want to re-enable hardware acceleration, we will have to repeat all the steps that we discussed earlier, only we will have to enable the option instead of disabling it, the switch must be gray.
