In this article, we will learn how to disable hardware acceleration in Windows 10 Photos app. By default, it is enabled but can give you issues if you are using older hardware which does not support GPU acceleration, or if a driver has some issues with enabling it.
The built-in Photos app allows viewing images and performing basic editing. Its tile is pinned to the Start menu. Also, the app is associated with most image file formats out of the box. Photos offers very basic functionality to view images from the user's local drive or from the OneDrive cloud storage.
The Photos app comes with a set of 3D effects. The feature is supposed to allow users to add 3D objects and use advanced effects on them. See
Add 3D Effects to Images with Photos in Windows 10
When you save an image with 3D effects, the Photos app writes your work to a video file. It is using your video card (GPU) for hardware accelerated video encoding. If you have issues with this feature, e.g. if you are getting broken video or inverted colors, you may try to disable it. Here is how it can be done.
Note: You must be running Photos version 2018.18081.12810.0 or above to access this option.
To disable hardware acceleration in Windows 10 Photos app, do the following.
- Open Photos. Its tile is pinned to the Start menu by default.
- Click the three dots menu button in the top right corner.
- Select the Settings command from the menu.
- In Settings, go to the Video section.
- Turn off the option Use hardware-accelerated video encoding.
You can re-enable this option at any moment to turn on hardware acceleration for video encoding in Photos.
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