How to Turn Hardware Acceleration On in Chrome
You can turn hardware acceleration on through Chrome’s settings:
How to Force Hardware Acceleration in Chrome
The final thing you can try to enable acceleration when Chrome doesn’t seem to want to is to override one of the many system flags: Under the System heading, locate and enable the Use hardware acceleration when available option. If you see that the “Use hardware acceleration when available” option is already enabled but your GPU settings show that acceleration is unavailable, follow the next step. At this point, Hardware accelerated should appear next to most of the items. If they still show up as being disabled, it could signal a problem with your graphics card or the drivers for your graphics card. Update the drivers on your computer to resolve these problems.
How to Turn Off Hardware Acceleration in Chrome
Turning off hardware acceleration in Chrome is as easy as repeating the above steps for turning it on, but removing the option instead of enabling it.
Is Hardware Acceleration Already Turned On in Chrome?
The best way to check whether hardware acceleration is turned on in Chrome is to type chrome://gpu into the address bar at the top of the browser. A whole host of results will be returned but the bit you’re interested in is the section titled “Graphics Feature Status.” The important thing to look for is to the right of each of these items. You should see Hardware accelerated if hardware acceleration is enabled. Some might read Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled, but that’s fine. The majority of these entries—like Canvas, Flash, Compositing, Multiple Raster Threads, Video Decode, and WebGL—should be turned on, however. If all or most of your values are set to disabled then you should read on to find out how to turn hardware acceleration on.
How to Know if Hardware Acceleration Helps
Visit the Demos of Open Web Technologies page to test whether hardware acceleration works better on or off. The site is provided by Mozilla developers, the people behind the Firefox web browser, but the tests work equally well in Chrome. The page provides a number of links that will show how well your browser performs. For example, a very simple demo is provided by this animated blob, but there are further examples including these draggable videos and this 3D Rubik’s Cube. If you have a decent graphics card, try finding websites with high-end Flash animations and games to see whether there’s any stuttering. Also, try watching high-definition videos on YouTube and make sure the video is crystal clear. Hardware acceleration can’t help with buffering. However, you might find that other features of Chrome perform far better than before.
