How to disable hardware acceleration in Google Chrome

• To disable Chrome’s hardware acceleration, Google Chrome > Settings > System and turn off the “Use hardware acceleration when available” toggle switch.
• You can turn on the toggle switch to re-enable the feature at any time.

On Google Chrome, hardware acceleration is a feature that offloads graphics-intensive tasks to your device’s GPU instead of relying solely on the CPU. This helps improve performance when rendering web pages, playing videos, and running web apps across Windows 11, Windows 10, macOS, and Linux.

Although the feature is designed to enhance performance, it doesn’t always work as expected. Depending on your graphics driver, system configuration, or browser version, hardware acceleration can cause visual glitches, flickering, screen tearing, or interface elements such as menus and dialog boxes to fail to render correctly.

When these issues occur, turning off hardware acceleration is often one of the quickest and most effective troubleshooting steps to restore normal browser behavior.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to disable hardware acceleration in Chrome. If you use Microsoft Edge, you can also turn off GPU acceleration using similar settings.

• Disable hardware acceleration on Chrome
• Enable hardware acceleration on Chrome
• Pureinfotech’s Take

Disable hardware acceleration on Chrome

To turn off hardware acceleration in Google Chrome, follow these steps:

1. Open Chrome on Windows 11.

2. Click the horizontal ellipsis menu button in the top-right corner and click on Settings.

3. Click on System.

4. Turn off the “Use hardware acceleration when available” toggle switch under the “System” section.

   

5. Click the Relaunch button.

Once you complete the steps, the menus and visual elements should render correctly on Chrome.

Enable hardware acceleration on Chrome

To enable hardware acceleration on Google Chrome, follow these steps:

1. Open Google Chrome.

2. Click the Settings and More (three-dotted) button on the top-right corner.

3. Click on Settings.

4. Click on System.

5. Turn on the “Use graphics acceleration when available” toggle switch under the “System” section to enable hardware acceleration.

   

6. Click the Relaunch button.

After you complete the steps, the browser will offload some processes to the graphics card instead of using the processor exclusively.

Pureinfotech’s Take

Disabling hardware acceleration in Google Chrome is one of those small tweaks that can make a noticeable difference when the browser starts acting up. While the feature is designed to boost performance by leveraging the GPU, it’s also a frequent source of rendering issues, especially on systems with outdated or incompatible graphics drivers.

If you’re seeing flickering, broken menus, or interface glitches on Windows 11, turning this setting off is often faster and more effective than digging through driver updates or reinstalling the browser. It’s a low-risk change, easy to reverse, and in many cases, it immediately restores stability.

That said, on modern hardware with stable drivers, keeping hardware acceleration enabled still delivers better performance for video playback, animations, and web apps. The key is knowing when to disable it. Use it as a targeted fix, not a permanent default, unless your system consistently behaves better without it.

If you’re troubleshooting browser issues, this should be one of the first settings to check, alongside clearing cache and verifying extensions.

Update April 24, 2026: This guide has been updated to ensure accuracy and reflect changes to the process.