hardware acceleration warning when opening PC version

[Laochra]

Yesterday, I started getting a pop-up that said something about hardware acceleration was off?
I use Opera & hubby plays his city in Chrome.
This alert is showing up in both browsers.
Both browsers have updated hardware acceleration & both are turned on. PC runs on Windows 11.
Video card (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660) is up to date.

 

[Laochra]

Nevermind! I went into the video card settings & turned on the image scaling to boost the frame rates in the games & when I restarted the browsers, the pop-up went away in both. Graphics look even crisper now!

 

[Astram]

This generally occurs after a GPU update. moving to Question and Help

 

[ajqtrz]

Yep, it's a techie thing. "Hardware acceleration" is the term used to tell the system to use the graphics processing unit (GPU) and it's circuitry to figure out what pixels to turn of and which on, rather than using the program itself to do all the calculations. The game/program/operating systems use the CPU (Central Processing Unit, -- which is actually the MPU "Microprocesor Unit," but I'll save that explanation for another windy day, lucky you!). . The GPU, which is a processing unit specifically built to rapidly draw screens, has been around for nearly as long as PC's. The default position is for "Hardware acceleration" to be on, but to run really old programs the PC has the ability to turn it off since those old programs may not be able to handle going through the GPU.

AJ

 

[crackie]

Except it isn’t always related to hardware acceleration or drivers when you get this error from my experience. It is related to the display adapter, but my sense is it’s just ran out of RAM to continue rendering. You can shut down the browser completely (not just the tab), restart the browser, and everything will be magically working again despite never touching or fiddling with a single hardware acceleration setting or updating any display drivers. Another clue it is not always hardware acceleration and is more RAM related issue is it happens more often when I simultaneously have the game and heavy graphic/resource intense apps opened too, like Photoshop or AfterEffects. These apps not only gobble up plenty of RAM, but also set to require hardware acceleration as well. Hence, it’s silly that hardware acceleration is turned on and working just fine in my graphics suites but somehow missing or misconfigured for a browser game at the same time. Photoshop would not be happy either if my hardware acceleration truly wasn’t working.

I will sometimes get this message when my browser craps out of memory (RAM). Too many tabs opened, too many things playing at once, idling the game too long, and my favorite, too many manual battles in a row. When it happens, you can pull up the task manager and witness the RAM hogginess of your browser. Most browsers like chrome will isolate each tab to its own sandbox environment. That protects your system from crashing too if one tab crashes, but it also means using way more resources. Furthermore, when you alleviate the RAM usage with better memory management, like occasionally refresh the game tab to stuff any memory leaks, close extraneous unused tabs, or use addon extensions to automatically suspend unused/idle tabs, the issue goes away.

 

[Laochra]

Yep, it's a techie thing. "Hardware acceleration" is the term used to tell the system to use the graphics processing unit (GPU) and it's circuitry to figure out what pixels to turn of and which on, rather than using the program itself to do all the calculations. The game/program/operating systems use the CPU (Central Processing Unit, -- which is actually the MPU "Microprocesor Unit," but I'll save that explanation for another windy day, lucky you!). . The GPU, which is a processing unit specifically built to rapidly draw screens, has been around for nearly as long as PC's. The default position is for "Hardware acceleration" to be on, but to run really old programs the PC has the ability to turn it off since those old programs may not be able to handle going through the GPU.

AJ

No worries, I follow you! My dad's a network engineering consultant for military contractors (retired navy) & he taught my hubby how to build pcs from scratch.

 

[muffy.]

@crackie , very correct and very well said