How to Disable Hardware Acceleration on Windows 11, 10, 8, 7

Contents:

• Hardware Acceleration Overview
• What is Hardware Acceleration?
• What Does Hardware Acceleration Do?
• How to Disable Hardware Acceleration on Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11?
• How to Fix Hardware Acceleration Greyed out on Windows 10/11?

Hardware Acceleration Overview

In some cases, once you found that Windows 10/11 screen flickers or goes into black screen suddenly, there is much need to consider something about hardware acceleration on Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11. And if you are experiencing fuzzy or blurry videos or games in browsers, you would better try to disable hardware acceleration on Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.

And when seen from the screenshot below, your Hardware acceleration is set as Full, which means that hardware acceleration is enabled by default. In this way, you need to turn off this function to see if it works for the flashing monitors or any other image or video related issues.

But most of you may have no clue about what the hardware acceleration does on Windows 10, not to mention how to disable it to solve hardware acceleration issues.

Here this post will show you how to turn hardware acceleration off on Windows 7, 8, 10 to improve computer’s performance.

What is Hardware Acceleration?

For the sake of your understanding, hardware acceleration is designed to dispatch some tasks of CPU to GPU, thus relieving the burden of CPU. In doing so, PC performance will be greatly enhanced since the CPU can process faster. That can be a way to make you watch more smooth and steady videos.

In detail, now people tend to simply regard hardware acceleration as graphics acceleration since it often functions for a graphics card or sometimes sound card.

Of course, you would better leave hardware acceleration turned on for better graphics performance, but if there is anything wrong with the video card, for instance, an application has been blocked from accessing graphics hardware, you should attempt to turn Windows 10 hardware graphics acceleration off immediately.

What Does Hardware Acceleration Do?

As mentioned above, hardware acceleration means that the CPU allocates a larger part of the work to the corresponding hardware for processing to reduce the burden on the processor. With the rapid development of hardware, hardware also has more advanced functions.

Simply put, the hardware already has part of the processor’s working capabilities, which improves execution efficiency and reduces CPU workload.

So what can hardware acceleration do? For example, the current graphics cards already have the function of hardware acceleration. The advantage of this is that the CPU does not need to perform video decoding, but uses a graphic card such as NVIDIA, Intel or AMD for decoding.

From a practical point of view, some cost-effective computers can also play high-definition video smoothly. In addition, the CPU usage is low, and users can watch videos while doing other things without affecting them (such as compressing and decompressing, rendering pictures, animations, etc.).

How to Disable Hardware Acceleration on Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11?

Depending on your Windows system, you are supposed to refer to different steps to disable hardware acceleration.

Normally, it is feasible to increase or reduce hardware acceleration on Windows 7, 8. Whereas you can only choose to enable or disable it on Windows 10 earlier versions.

So if you are determined to change the graphics performance, let’s get started to configure hardware acceleration. This post aims to close the hardware acceleration function to fix various display problems.

Part 1: Disable Hardware Acceleration on Windows 7, 8

As suggested, on Windows 7 and 8, you can either disable graphics acceleration by turning it to None or decrease its value.

If you have any graphics card errors, besides updating drivers, disabling hardware acceleration might also help.

1. Right-click the Desktop blank space and then select Personalize from the right-click menu.

2. In Control Panel Display, hit Change display settings.

3. Click Advanced settings and then OK to move on.

4. Under Troubleshoot, choose to Change settings.

5. Then in Display Adapter Troubleshooter, turn off Windows 7 hardware acceleration by turning the slider to the left side where None shows.

Here as long as Hardware Acceleration is not greyed out and unavailable, if you wish Windows 7, 8 hardware acceleration reduce, you should try to move to the left until a value suits you rather than None.

The moment you restarted your PC, you will have successfully disabled hardware acceleration on Windows 7, 8.

After that, in a large sense, you won’t encounter graphics errors, but if you are still experiencing fuzzy or blurry videos or games in browsers, you would better try to disable hardware acceleration on Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.

Part 2: Turn off Hardware Acceleration on Windows 10/11

Normally, you can’t increase or decrease hardware acceleration on Windows 10, what you can do is to disable hardware acceleration.

And in normal cases, Windows 10 hardware acceleration is turned on automatically by default, but you can check it using DirectX Diagnostic tool.

1. Search dxdiag in the box to open DirectX Diagnostic tool.

2. In DirectX Diagnostic Tool, under the Display tab, you can see the hardware acceleration has been enabled.

As you can see above, the DirectDraw, Direct3D, and AGP Texture Acceleration are enabled. It implies that Windows 10 hardware acceleration has been activated as well.

If you would rather the hardware acceleration on Windows 10 disabled, just go ahead.

Here things go special with Windows 10 as it has been updated at intervals. In earlier Windows 10 versions, you are able to turn off hardware acceleration as you wish. But with the updates of Windows 10, the graphics card manufacturers have integrated the function of hardware graphics acceleration.

In such cases, it makes sense to first check whether your graphics card support hardware acceleration since there is no such functionality in recent updates, like Windows 10 1803.

For Earlier Windows 10 Versions:

Go to Start > Settings > System > Display > Advanced graphics settings > Display adapter properties.

Then you will see the Display adapter properties as that in Windows 7. And you can try to do as Part 1 to disable Windows 10 hardware acceleration under Troubleshoot tab.

For Windows 10 Late Versions:

Since you are unable to find Windows 10 hardware acceleration as it is removed from the system but embedded into your graphics card, such as NVIDIA, AMD, Intel graphics card. Hence, you can navigate to the graphics card control panel to disable the hardware acceleration.

For your reference, it will show you how to turn Windows 10 graphics acceleration in the NVIDIA Control Panel.

1. Right click Desktop blank space and then choose NVIDIA Control Panel from the list.

2. In NVIDIA Control Panel, go to 3D settings > Configure Surround, PhysX and then set CPU as the Processor rather than Auto-select or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti.

That will let CPU run tasks and disable NVIDIA acceleration on Windows 10.

Similarly, you are able to make use of the same way to configure the hardware acceleration settings for AMD, Intel HD graphics cards.

Here if you hope to turn off graphics acceleration to fix video card issues, you can also update the NVIDIA driver, Intel, or AMD driver for Windows 10.

Nevertheless, according to many users, in the process of turning off Windows 10, 8, 7 hardware graphics acceleration, you have met the grayed out hardware acceleration, which makes you fail to switch off this option.

So if you are incapable of removing hardware acceleration on Windows 10, move on to finish it in Registry Editor.

How to Fix Hardware Acceleration Greyed out on Windows 10/11?

Either there is no hardware acceleration on Windows 10 1803 and later or hardware acceleration is unavailable on Windows 7, 8, you can just turn to Registry Editor to disable it.

Even if the Disable HWAcceleration value does not exist in Registry, you can also add one and make it turn off Windows 10 hardware acceleration.

But before doing that, you must back up your registries in case of any data loss, which is why you are suggested to try this way in the final place.

1. Hit Windows + R and then input regedit in the box.

2. In Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USERSOFTWARE\Microsoft\Graphics.

3. Under Avalon.Graphics, on the right pane, check if there is a key named DisableHWAcceleration.

If there isn’t, on the right side, right click the blank space to create a New DW0RD (32-bit) Value and name it DisableHWAcceleration.

4. Right-click the newly added value of DisableHWAcceleration to Modify it.

5. Change DisableHWAcceleraion from 0 to 1 to disable Windows 10 hardware acceleration.

6. Reboot Windows 10 and then you will find the flickering or black screen disappeared due to the disabled hardware acceleration.

In this way, you can not only solve hardware acceleration greyed out issue on Windows 10 but also turn graphics acceleration off from registry editor.

In short, assisted by this tutorial, you are able to master the methods to turn hardware acceleration off on Windows 7, 8, and 10. And even if it is not available, you can also ask the registry editor for help.

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