If you are trying to play a high-definition video on YouTube or scroll through a highly complex, animation-heavy website, and Google Chrome feels sluggish, choppy, or unresponsive, the browser is likely relying entirely on your computer’s central processor (CPU) to render the graphics.
To massively improve the browser’s performance and eliminate stuttering, you must instruct Chrome to offload these heavy graphical rendering tasks to your computer’s dedicated graphics card (GPU). This feature is called “Hardware Acceleration,” and while it is usually enabled by default, certain driver updates can occasionally disable it without warning.
How to Enable Hardware Acceleration
- Open the Google Chrome browser.
- Look at the top-right corner of the window (directly below the ‘X’ close button) and click the three vertical dots to open the main menu.
- Select Settings from the drop-down list.
- In the left-hand navigation sidebar, locate and click on System.
- Look for the toggle switch explicitly labeled Use graphics acceleration when available (on older versions of Chrome, this might be labeled “Use hardware acceleration when available”).
- Click the switch so it turns blue (On).
The moment you flip the switch, a new Relaunch button will appear directly next to it. You must click this Relaunch button to completely close and restart the browser; the changes will not take effect until Chrome boots up again.
When Should You Disable It?
While Hardware Acceleration is objectively better for 99% of users, it can occasionally cause bizarre visual glitches. If you notice that Google Chrome is suddenly displaying weird black squares, green flickering lines on YouTube videos, or if the browser is crashing constantly, it usually indicates a conflict between Chrome and your graphics card drivers.
In those incredibly rare troubleshooting scenarios, you should return to this exact same settings menu and toggle Hardware Acceleration off. If the visual glitches instantly disappear upon relaunching the browser, you know your graphics card drivers are corrupted and need to be updated.