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what is the downside of turning off hardware acceleration as a fix for extreme gpu usage caused by google's search page....

tsoilihoi
tsoilihoi
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Thank you for helping me determine that the google search page animation is taxing the gpu. I have the latest drivers installed on two dell machines. They have on-board cards. The usage on the search page... www.google.com is 99% and working in firefox safe mode doesn't help. BUT turning off hardware acceleration cures the problem as the usage drops to 8 %

I can use duckduckgo.com or a search result page as suggested but it seems to me that other pages will have memory intensive animation which Firefox has trouble with. In this case all other browsers are unaffected by google.com's main search page.

I have an I-5 processor and 8 gigs of ram. At work, an I-7 processor and 12 gigs of ram. In the end this seems to be a firefox issue as both machines are typical Dell's.

I wonder if google is doing something unusual?

Thanks in advance for the help, I'd like to continue to use firefox, but the freezing is not at all helpful.

Thank you for helping me determine that the google search page animation is taxing the gpu. I have the latest drivers installed on two dell machines. They have on-board cards. The usage on the search page... www.google.com is 99% and working in firefox safe mode doesn't help. BUT turning off hardware acceleration cures the problem as the usage drops to 8 % I can use duckduckgo.com or a search result page as suggested but it seems to me that other pages will have memory intensive animation which Firefox has trouble with. In this case all other browsers are unaffected by google.com's main search page. I have an I-5 processor and 8 gigs of ram. At work, an I-7 processor and 12 gigs of ram. In the end this seems to be a firefox issue as both machines are typical Dell's. I wonder if google is doing something unusual? Thanks in advance for the help, I'd like to continue to use firefox, but the freezing is not at all helpful.

All Replies (4)

Chandan_Baba
Chandan_Baba
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Hi, I am sure you know why Hardware acceleration is required and default "on" is set into the browser. if you haven't altered its settings. Sometimes it will freeze your browser due to content loading. So You can shut off hardware acceleration: http://techdows.com/2017/08/firefox-55-disable-hardware-acceleration.html

tsoilihoi
tsoilihoi Question owner
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I have shut it off and it solves the problem that the heavily animated search page is causing... My question is... what will be the downside of leaving hardware acceleration off? The gpu usage is way down and that good... I am wondering what the negative affects will be if acceleration is off?

Happy112
Happy112
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tsoilihoi said

I have shut it off and it solves the problem that the heavily animated search page is causing... My question is... what will be the downside of leaving hardware acceleration off? The gpu usage is way down and that good... I am wondering what the negative affects will be if acceleration is off?

You may find this thread interesting :

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/6lhody/hardware_acceleration_on_or_off/

Chandan_Baba
Chandan_Baba
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tsoilihoi said

I have shut it off and it solves the problem that the heavily animated search page is causing... My question is... what will be the downside of leaving hardware acceleration off? The GPU usage is way down and that good... I am wondering what the negative effects will be if acceleration is off?

Hardware Acceleration is mainly used for High-quality playback and recording by sound cards as well Graphics cards utilize hardware acceleration to allow quicker, higher-quality playback of movies, videos and games. They are also better at physics and fast mathematical calculations than a CPU.

So disabling this can affect in mostly these two cases.

If this helped you, please vote up, so community can get help.

Modified by Chandan_Baba