Hardware acceleration lets Chrome use the graphics processor for video, scrolling, animations, and complex page rendering. It usually improves performance. When graphics drivers are outdated or buggy, the same feature can cause flickering, crashes, strange colors, blank areas, or video problems.
Does this affect you?
Use this for Chrome on Windows or Mac when visual glitches, page rendering problems, crashes on certain pages, or choppy video may be related to GPU acceleration. Edge and Firefox have similar settings under slightly different names.
Turn hardware acceleration off
This is quick to test and easy to reverse.
- Click the three-dot menu in Chrome.
- Open Settings.
- Choose System.
- Turn off Use graphics acceleration when available.
- Click Relaunch when Chrome shows the button.
- Revisit the page or video that was causing trouble.
Update your graphics drivers instead
If turning acceleration off helps, a driver update may let you turn it back on safely.
- On Windows, open Windows Update > Advanced options > Optional updates and check Driver updates.
- If needed, download the latest graphics driver from Nvidia, AMD, or Intel for your specific hardware.
- On Mac, install available updates from System Settings > General > Software Update.
- After updating, return to chrome://settings/system, turn graphics acceleration back on, relaunch Chrome, and test again.
More control
Do not disable it as a precaution
Hardware acceleration helps streaming, video calls, browser games, maps, and graphics-heavy sites. Turn it off to diagnose or fix a real problem, not just because the setting exists.
Check Chrome GPU status
Open chrome://gpu and look at Graphics Feature Status. Hardware accelerated means the feature is active. Software only or unavailable means Chrome may already have disabled acceleration because of a detected driver issue.
Dual-GPU laptops can behave differently
Some laptops switch between integrated graphics and a stronger discrete GPU. If problems happen only on battery, check Nvidia, AMD, or Windows graphics performance settings for Chrome.
Expect a tradeoff
If disabling acceleration fixes crashes but makes video calls or browser games choppy, update drivers and try turning it back on. Leaving it off permanently is not always the best long-term setup.
Sources
- Google Chrome Help – Fix page crashes and other page loading errors (2025)
- Chromium Project – GPU architecture documentation (2025)
- Microsoft Support – Manage graphics performance settings (2025)