Enabling Hardware Acceleration on Chrome for Mac

By Andrew Schrader

Enable hidden Google Chrome settings to load media faster and improve graphics.
i Brand X Pictures/Brand X Pictures/Getty Images

No matter how fast Google Chrome performs on your Mac, enabling hardware acceleration can help load media faster while improving your graphics quality. Hardware acceleration uses your graphics card, or GPU, to load and view media, rather than relying on your computer's slower CPU. You can enable a basic hardware acceleration setting in Google Chrome's general settings; however, you can also power Google Chrome almost entirely with your GPU by unlocking two experimental Google Chrome options.

Basic Hardware Acceleration

Step 1

Click the "Chrome" menu option at the top of the Chrome window, and then select "Preferences."

Step 2

Click the "Show Advanced Settings" button near the bottom of the Settings page.

Step 3

Select the "Use hardware acceleration when available" option in the System portion of the menu.

Experimental Hardware Acceleration

Step 1

Type "about:flags" (without quotation marks) into Google Chrome's address bar, and then press "Enter."

Step 2

Scroll down to the "GPU compositing on all pages" option, and then select "Enable" from the drop-down menu.

Step 3

Scroll down to the "GPU accelerated canvas 2D" option, and then click the "Enable" option.

Step 4

Close and reopen Google Chrome to save your changes.

×