How to Enable Hardware Acceleration in Google Chrome

How to Enable Hardware Acceleration in Google Chrome – Many of reader probably already know how to do it but for the rest, here’s a quick tip to enable hardware acceleration in Chromium Browser.

What is Hardware Acceleration

Hardware acceleration is a technique designed to improve the performance of software that is running on graphics hardware, namely graphics processing units (GPUs). Hardware acceleration is a term used to describe the ability of a system to accelerate the execution of a program by offloading work from the CPU and executing it on the GPU. Hardware acceleration can be implemented in software or hardware. In software, the host operating system can use a graphics API to directly accelerate the execution of a program.

If you use Chromium browsers and its derivative such as Maxthon for Linux, Google Chrome and many more you find, the hardware acceleration is disabled for your graphics card by default, you can try to force it to get better video playback performance as well as support for features such as the 3D Earth view in the new Google Maps.

To check if your Chromium browser and Google Chrome uses hardware acceleration or not, open a new tab, type: “chrome://gpu” (without the quotes) and look under “Graphics Feature status” – all (or at least most of) the features should say “hardware accelerated”. For Maxthon Browser for Linux type: “mx://gpu” (without quote). You will look like this if you are not enabled it yet :

How to Enable Hardware Acceleration in Google Chrome

To force Chrome, Chromium, Maxthon in Linux use hardware acceleration, open a new tab, type “chrome://flags” (without quotes), search for “Override software rendering list“, enable it and restart browser. For Maxthon user type: “mx://flags” (without quote).

Try this out:

you should now be able to access the 3D Earth Google Maps feature (look for an “Earth” icon in the Google Maps Preview lower right corner);
try some 1080p full-screen HTML5 or Flash videos with and without hardware acceleration in Chrome – in my test using Intel graphics under Ubuntu, a full-screen video used twice as much CPU without hardware acceleration than when enabling hardware acceleration in Chrome;

If you experience issues after this change, simply revert it: open “chrome://flags” (without quotes) in Chrome and disable it or simply you can reset all to default using button provided in Chrome. That’s How to Enable Hardware Acceleration in Google Chrome.

Hardware acceleration is a way to improve performance on web pages. It is a feature that is generally available on newer computers and laptops. It can also be enabled on older computers, but it is not always as effective. When hardware acceleration is enabled, graphics are offloaded from the CPU and are handled by the graphics card instead. This allows the CPU to focus on other tasks, such as running other programs and processes at the same time.