Have you encountered the term "hardware acceleration" and wondered what it means?

Read on to find out what hardware acceleration means, what it does and its advantages, and why you may want to enable or disable it.

What Is Hardware Acceleration? What Does Hardware Acceleration Do?

discord hardware acceleration option

Hardware acceleration is a process where applications offload certain tasks to hardware in your system, especially to accelerate that task. The hardware can perform the task better and more efficiently than if the same process used only your general-purpose CPU.

While hardware acceleration can be defined as any task offloaded to something other than your CPU, hardware acceleration typically refers to handing tasks to GPUs and sound cards. As specialized hardware, they are better suited to perform certain activities.

For example, if you play a game on a computer that doesn't have a dedicated graphics card, you will be able to play it, but the performance won't be the same as a system with a dedicated GPU. A discrete GPU is built to handle high-performance graphics processing, unlike the CPU. Furthermore, a dedicated GPU reduces the CPU processing load, freeing it for other tasks it can complete more efficiently than a GPU.

Graphics Processing

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are an essential component of hardware acceleration, particularly with tasks involving rendering images, animations, and videos. Whether you're playing a video game, running a simulation, or streaming high-definition video, the GPU takes on the heavy lifting.

Instead of your CPU trying to calculate every single pixel in a frame (which could be millions), it delegates that task to the GPU, which is specifically designed to handle such complex, parallel computations. This leads to smoother, higher-quality visuals and frees up the CPU to handle other tasks more efficiently.

Sound Processing

Sound cards, or audio processing units (APUs), are specialized hardware used for processing audio signals. These components can take over audio-related tasks from the CPU, leading to clearer, higher-quality sound. This is particularly crucial in scenarios where audio quality matters, such as music production, gaming, or any professional audio application.

An APU can perform tasks like spatialization (3D sound effects), reverberation, and mixing multiple sound channels, which would otherwise put a significant burden on the CPU.

Cryptographic Processing

Cryptographic processors, also known as cryptographic accelerators, are hardware devices specifically designed to handle the computationally intense operations involved in encrypting and decrypting data.

These tasks, such as generating key pairs, hashing, or executing cryptographic algorithms like RSA or AES, are highly demanding. Offloading them to a cryptographic processor can result in faster and more secure data transfers, which is crucial for applications like secure web browsing, online banking, or any scenario where sensitive data is transmitted or stored.

What Is Tethering Hardware Acceleration?

Tethering hardware acceleration is one of the many types of hardware acceleration available, though it is far from common.

For example, you can use tethering hardware acceleration to act as a Wi-Fi hotspot, offloading tasks related to tethering onto a dedicated Wi-Fi chip that handles it more efficiently, reducing the system workload.

Tethering works over Bluetooth, wireless LAN, and physical cable.

9 Uses of Hardware Acceleration

Hardware acceleration is applicable in many different fields, including but not limited to:

  1. Computer graphics using a graphics processing unit (GPU)
  2. Digital signal processing using a Digital Signal Processor (DSP)
  3. Analog signal processing with a field-programmable analog array (FPAA)
  4. Sound processing using a sound card
  5. Computer networking using a network processor and network interface controller
  6. Cryptography via a cryptographic accelerator and secure cryptoprocessor
  7. Artificial Intelligence using an AI accelerator
  8. In-memory processing using a network on a chip and systolic array
  9. Any given computing task via field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), complex programmable logic devices (CPLD), and system-on-a-chip (SoC)

If you have a powerful and stable GPU, enabling hardware acceleration will allow you to utilize your GPU to its full extent in games and all supported use cases.

Using hardware acceleration in Google Chrome allows you to consume media and browse through your daily routine much smoother. That's another thing: if it starts causing freezing and crashing issues, you may need to disable hardware acceleration.

While editing and rendering videos in software like Adobe Premiere Pro, or when streaming on Twitch or YouTube using software like OBS, enabling hardware acceleration allows you to use the specialized hardware, which typically is your GPU, to give you faster export times and a better user experience with your streaming software.

If you have the latest drivers and your GPU is decently powerful, always enable hardware when you see the option. You'll have a much smoother experience with that application after enabling hardware acceleration.

Should You Disable Hardware Acceleration?

Although hardware acceleration speeds things up and is a great feature, it sometimes may do more harm than good. For example, in Google Chrome, hardware acceleration can sometimes cause issues like crashing or freezing in Chrome and to fix these issues, you may need to disable hardware acceleration.

There are several other reasons you may want to disable hardware acceleration:

  • If you have a relatively powerful CPU compared to the rest of your computer's components, hardware acceleration may be ineffective for certain tasks.
  • If your PC is overheating, especially the GPU, you may not want to use hardware acceleration.
  • The software that manages your hardware acceleration settings may not be doing a good job or may not be as stable when working with your CPU. This is another reason you may not want to use GPU or hardware acceleration.

Figuring out when to use hardware acceleration or not isn't always clear, but most programs will automatically toggle the setting depending on your system hardware.

How to Disable Hardware Acceleration in Google Chrome

To disable hardware acceleration in Google Chrome, go to Menu > Settings > System and disable Use hardware acceleration when available near the bottom of the list.

google chrome disable hardware acceleration

Another option is to head to Menu > Settings and search hardware acceleration in the search bar, and it'll highlight the hardware acceleration settings for you.

The process of disabling hardware acceleration varies between programs and operating systems, so it's best to complete an internet search to find out how to switch it off in other situations.

Hardware Acceleration vs. Software Acceleration

Software acceleration is a method where software is specifically optimized to perform certain tasks more efficiently than general-purpose software. These optimizations can happen at various levels, such as the algorithmic level, where an algorithm is fine-tuned for maximum performance, or at the coding level, where programming techniques are used to take advantage of specific hardware features.

In contrast to hardware acceleration, where specialized hardware components like GPUs or sound cards are used to speed up certain tasks, software acceleration relies on the CPU and its ability to process various instructions. This makes software acceleration more versatile in some ways, as it doesn't require specific hardware and can work on a wide range of devices.

However, this does not mean that software acceleration is always the best choice. While it can be beneficial in situations where specific hardware isn't available or when dealing with tasks that are difficult to parallelize (and hence aren't well-suited to GPUs), in many scenarios, hardware acceleration can offer significantly better performance.

Software acceleration is only beneficial in a limited number of special-purpose applications. Conversely, hardware acceleration is useful for a wider variety of common, graphically intensive tasks.

4 Tips and Questions on Using Hardware Acceleration

Let's look at a few questions related to hardware acceleration and their answers.

Is Hardware Acceleration Good or Bad?

Hardware acceleration is good because it boosts performance for certain tasks.

But sometimes, it may cause issues such as freezing or crashing in Google Chrome or other browsers, forcing you to disable the feature to fix the issue.

Should You Turn Off Hardware Acceleration?

Unless you're facing an issue that you know is because of hardware acceleration, you shouldn't turn off hardware acceleration. It'll generally do more good than harm, but when you see it is causing you more harm instead, that's when you should turn it off for that one specific app.

Does Your Computer Support Hardware Acceleration?

If you have a dedicated graphics card, your computer supports hardware acceleration. All you have to do now is install an app that uses hardware acceleration and see if you can enable it in its settings.

Does Hardware Acceleration Use More Battery?

Turning on hardware acceleration may improve your battery life, performance, and responsiveness if managed efficiently. Hardware acceleration offloads certain tasks from the CPU to the GPU or any other specialized hardware that can do it more efficiently, resulting in faster processing times and longer-lasting batteries.

Hardware Acceleration Speeds Up Task Processing

Hardware acceleration is a handy tool for speeding up processing. Most of the time, it's not something you have to consider specifically. If you have a graphics card, your computer will typically use it automatically when you play games, and so on. There are times when hardware acceleration can cause issues, at which point you're best off turning it off until you can resolve the issue or pin it down to malfunctioning hardware acceleration.