How to force enable hardware acceleration in Chrome, Chromium

Chrome and Chromium Browsers work great with hardware acceleration enabled. If the browsers sees incompatible graphics card (GPU) in your computer, hardware acceleration gets disabled by default settings, meaning all the load goes on CPU, when running a full HD video content in the browser. The result is a super sluggish performance of PC in responding to other applications.

Having said that, it is still possible to force the browsers to use the hardware. Before doing that let’s first check if your browsers are already using hardware acceleration or not.

Checking if Chrome/Chromium is using hardware acceleration

Step 1) Launch browser and type chrome://gpu in the address field.

Step 2) Check “Graphics Feature status” section. It should say for most of features “hardware accelerated”.

Hardware Acceleration enabled

Here is how a software-only acceleration looks like:

Software only acceleration

Forcing Chrome/Chromium browser to use hardware acceleration

Step 1) Type chrome://flags in the address field and press enter.

Step 2) Look for “Override software rendering list”, and enable it.

Step 3) Click “Relaunch now”.

Override Hardware Acceleration settings using Chrome Flags

Now try opening a full HD or 4K video from YouTube or some website. Do you see improvement? Do let us know in the comments below.