What Is Hardware Acceleration and Why Does It Matter
Chances are you’ve seen a “hardware acceleration” option when using various applications and devices. You may have even needed to enable or disable it to boost performance/prevent bugs in one of your favorite applications, but you may not have known why. In this article we’ll explain everything you need to know about hardware acceleration and whether or not your apps might benefit from using it. Defining Hardware Acceleration Hardware acceleration is a term used to describe tasks being offloaded to devices and hardware which specialize in it. By default in most computers and applications the CPU is taxed, first and foremost, before other pieces of hardware are. While this is fine in most general usage cases, especially if someone has a strong CPU, there are others where it might be smart for your computer to utilize the other components in your system. This is where hardware acceleration comes into play, and we’ll give a few popular usage cases: Sound cards can be utilized by har...