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Disable Chrome Hardware Acceleration: Easy Steps

As with most web browsers, Chrome has hardware acceleration enabled by default. However, if it is causing problems, you can easily disable hardware acceleration in Chrome. This article shows you how.

Hardware acceleration is a feature that helps web browsers load pages faster by delegating some of the work to your computer’s graphics processing unit (GPU). a.k.a., graphics card. While this feature can improve performance for most users, it can also cause issues such as freezing, crashing, or visual artifacts. This feature can be especially problematic for older computers or those with outdated graphics drivers.

If you experience any of these issues while browsing the web, you may want to consider disabling hardware acceleration in Chrome. The advantage is that you don’t have to disable hardware acceleration system-wide. Thankfully, disabling hardware acceleration in Chrome is pretty easy and straightforward. Let me show you how.

Steps to disable hardware acceleration in Chrome

Follow the steps below to disable hardware acceleration in the Google Chrome web browser:

  1. Open the Chrome browser.
  2. Click on the three dots icon to open the menu.
  3. Click on the Settings option in the menu.
  4. Click the System option on the sidebar.
  5. Turn off the ‘Use hardware acceleration when available‘ option.
  6. Relaunch the Chrome browser.
  7. With that, you’ve disabled hardware acceleration in Chrome.

Since we only want to turn off hardware acceleration in Chrome, open it. You can either search for Google Chrome in the Start menu, click the taskbar icon, or double-click on the desktop shortcut.

After opening the Chrome browser, click the three dots icon on the top right corner of the browser window to open the menu. Click the Settings option in the menu.

open Chrome settings

The above action will open the Chrome settings page. Here, select the ‘System’ option on the sidebar. Next, turn off the ‘Use hardware acceleration in Chrome’ option.

When prompted, click the Relaunch button to restart the Chrome browser.

disable Chrome hardware acceleration

Once the browser is restarted, hardware acceleration is completely disabled in your Chrome browser.

That is all. It is that simple to disable hardware acceleration in Google Chrome.

Why disable hardware acceleration in Google Chrome?

Though hardware acceleration is helpful in your day to day browsing, especially when loading graphics-intensive web pages, it can cause certain problems such as freezing, crashing, and visual artifacts.

Disabling hardware acceleration in Chrome can provide a more stable and reliable browsing experience, particularly for older computers or those with outdated graphics drivers. With hardware acceleration disabled, your computer’s CPU takes over the rendering process, resulting in smoother browsing.

Additionally, some web applications, pages, and extensions might be incompatible with Chrome hardware acceleration. In those cases, disabling it can help to reduce the frequency of crashes while browsing the web.

For laptop users, hardware acceleration can consume more power than software-based rendering. If you are looking for ways to conserve battery time, then disabling hardware acceleration in Chrome is one way.

I hope this simple and easy Windows how-to guide helped you.

If you are stuck or need help, send an email, and I will try to help as much as possible.

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