How to disable hardware acceleration on Microsoft Edge

  • To disable hardware acceleration, open

    Microsoft Edge

    >

    Settings

    >

    System

    and turn off the

    “Use graphics acceleration when available”

    toggle switch.
  • You can turn on the toggle switch to re-enable the feature at any time.

On

Windows 11

(and 10), Microsoft Edge comes with hardware acceleration, a feature that enables the browser to access the graphics card on the computer to speed up specific tasks and improve the overall user experience. However, depending on your computer configuration, hardware acceleration can negatively affect the experience by preventing visual elements from displaying correctly.

If you get menus and dialog boxes not rendering correctly, a green screen appears when playing a video on

Microsoft Edge

, or there are rendering issues on a virtual machine, disabling hardware acceleration can resolve the problem.

In this

guide

, I will teach you the steps to disable hardware acceleration on Microsoft Edge on

Windows 10

or 11. (If you use Google Chrome, you can

disable access to the graphics card

with these instructions.)

  • Disable hardware acceleration on Microsoft Edge

  • Enable hardware acceleration on Microsoft Edge

Disable hardware acceleration on Microsoft Edge

To disable hardware acceleration on Microsoft Edge, use these steps:

Open

Microsoft Edge

.

Click the

Settings and More

(three-dotted) button on the top-right corner.

Click on

Settings

.

Click on

System

.

Turn off the

“Use graphics acceleration when available”

toggle switch under the “System” section to disable hardware acceleration.

Graphics acceleration disabled

Click the

Restart

button.

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

Enable hardware acceleration on Microsoft Edge

To enable hardware acceleration on Microsoft Edge, use these steps:

Open

Microsoft Edge

.

Click the

Settings and More

(three-dotted) button on the top-right corner.

Click on

Settings

.

Click on

System

.

Turn on the

“Use graphics acceleration when available”

toggle switch under the “System” section to enable hardware acceleration.

Graphics acceleration enabled

Click the

Restart

button.

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

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