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Disable Hardware Acceleration in Microsoft Edge

How to Disable Hardware Acceleration in Microsoft Edge

The Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser is recently out of beta, and is now available to most users of Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and macOS. Under certain conditions, you may find out that the Chromium engine used in Edge fails to properly render a web page. Fonts may appear blurry or broken, or the overall browser performance may be slow. To resolve it, you can try to disable hardware acceleration.

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Microsoft recently released the first stable version of Microsoft Edge Chromium to the public. Surprisingly, Microsoft Edge is still supporting a number of aging Windows versions, including Windows 7, which has recently reached its end of support. Check out Windows Versions Supported by Microsoft Edge Chromium.

Interested users can download MSI installers for deployment and customization.

If you are facing notably slow web page rendering or issues with HTML5 videos or font rendering, you can try to disable hardware acceleration. The current video adapter driver may have compatibility issues or the display adapter might not support the proper acceleration profile, so it decreases performance instead of improving it.

Luckily, it doesn't involve editing of hidden settings or flags. This can be done using settings.

To Disable Hardware Acceleration in Microsoft Edge,

  1. Open Microsoft Edge.
  2. Click on the menu button with three dots.
  3. Select Settings from the menu.Microsoft Edge Chromium Settings Menu Item
  4. In Settings, click on System on the left.
  5. On the right, turn off the toggle option Use hardware acceleration when available.Edge Disable Hardware Acceleration
  6. Now click on the Restart button.Edge Disable Hardware Acceleration And Restart

You are done! The hardware acceleration feature is now disabled. You can re-enable it later at any moment.


For pre-release versions, Microsoft is currently using three channels to deliver updates to Edge Insiders. The Canary channel receives updates daily (except Saturday and Sunday), the Dev channel is getting updates weekly, and the Beta channel is updated every 6 weeks. Microsoft is going to support Edge Chromium on Windows 7, 8.1 and 10, alongside macOS, Linux (coming in the future) and mobile apps on iOS and Android.


Actual Edge versions

The actual versions of Edge Chromium at the moment of this writing are as follows:

You will find many Edge tricks and features covered in the following post:

Hands-on with the new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge

Also, see the following updates.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

5 thoughts on “Disable Hardware Acceleration in Microsoft Edge”

  1. Thanks for the information. But in my case I need to disable hardware acceleration because Edge is showing a blank screen. The Settings screen is also blank so I can’t disable hardware acceleration there. Is there a command line switch or another way? I tried Chrome’s command line switch of –disable-gpu but that didn’t work. It still displayed a white screen and put “xn—disable-gpu-j19f Network error” in the left upper corner.

    1. run the program in Windows Vista compatibility. disable acceleration in settings. restart browser. remove compatbility settings

  2. I click on the three dot menu button, then settings, but that opens a sidebar where my only options are “General”, “Privacy & Security”, “Passwords & Autofill”, or “Advanced”. There is no “System” option, and no option for hardware acceleration anywhere else.

  3. For me there is another problem. A component of ms edge msedgewebview2.exe is constantly running in the background and using my gtx970 preventing it to go to it’s idle frequency of about 300MHz. Disabling hardware acceleration in Edge does nothing to msedgewebview2.

    1. did you find a fix for this? I have an iGPU I would prefer it to run on, rather than my dedicated gpu. (i don’t mind it running, as it’s required by windows 11)

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