Disable display hardware acceleration on windows 10

Question

On Windows 10 the "windows 10" "display adapter troubleshooter" is often unavailable (depending on graphics driver). How do I disable hardware acceleration in such case? Reason is to avoid windows sucking GPU cycles while performing OpenCL computations.

Answer 1

Left Click Start menu, Click on the Photo/Image tile that Appears in the Top Right of the menu, Click the image & it should bring up a pane on the right hand side of the screen. Then Click on settings and scroll down to hardware acceleration to enable or disable.

(Note this can cause unwanted side effects like (inverted video color playback)). in browsers and video player such as MPC-HC & others.

Answer 2

Showing "display adapter troubleshooter" dialog and especially the HW acceleration slider are driver dependent on Windows 10. If advanced display settings do not show-up then it can't be used.

There is a registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics\DisableHWAcceleration that can be set to DWORD=1 that should disable Windows Presentation Forms applications to use hardware acceleration. Need some time to test whether this will affect unexpectedly low compute usage or not.

Update: at least visual artifacts disappeared in the remote desktop connection so there is some positive effect.

Thanks to (and some more thoughts in):

• lenovo forum answer
• thewindowsclub howto