What Is Hardware Acceleration – How Much Of This Do You Know?
Regardless of what you think, your internet speed and efficiency are not entirely related to your service provider. It means that no matter which of the Cox internet plans you've chosen, it does not guarantee a great experience. Why? Because it's not the only contributing party. Many other important factors play a role in ensuring you get your work done! One of these factors is hardware acceleration. Since many people have never heard of this term, you'll need the guide below to understand what it is and why it matters.
Hardware Acceleration and Everything About It
Hardware acceleration is not a new concept; it has been around for a while. But what makes it so bizarre to some people is that it is not popular. It's an underrated term, and not many experts discuss it. However, understanding it can help you ensure that your online experience is as great as possible.
What Is Hardware Acceleration?
Starting with the basics, let's first define hardware acceleration. It is a process that involves applications offloading particular tasks onto the hardware in the system, mainly to accelerate those tasks. As a result, it improves the overall performance, speed, and efficiency of that process, improving your overall experience online.
In other words, hardware acceleration hands over specific tasks to your sound cards and GPUs. Since they are specialized for certain jobs, they are well-suited to do the same activities and tasks in a much better and more efficient way. In a standard case, if you were using your general CPU for that task, it would have taken a lot more time, and the performance would have been below expectations.
Where to Find Hardware Acceleration
Now, you are probably wondering where you can find the hardware acceleration on your device. Contrary to what many people assume, it is not a button on the gadget that you can press. Instead, most devices and applications have hardware acceleration as an option, and it's not hidden under piles of technicalities and confusing options. In fact, many people have already come across this option, but they don't pay much attention to it.
Also, you will be surprised to know that many even disable or enable it, trying to get some other tasks done or as a protective measure against bugs. Yet, they have no idea what they just did and what hardware acceleration even is.
What Does It Do?
Hardware acceleration basically transports specific processes from your CPU to a much more specialized piece of hardware. For example, if you're playing a game online and you don't have the necessary graphic cards for it, you might be able to play the game, but you will not be able to enjoy it as well as you should. The performance will not be adequate or as great as you expected. You need a specific GPU for it. Hence, discrete GPUs are explicitly built for this purpose. They handle all the high-performance processing tasks for graphics, which CPUs are not specialized to do. Plus, the GPU will reduce the processing load so it may focus on other tasks and do them efficiently. This is precisely what hardware acceleration does and how it boosts the overall performance of the application or device.
When Should One Use It?
As great as it is, you cannot apply hardware acceleration to anything and everything. There are certain cases where it is applicable, and the following are the most important ones:
- Google Chrome to access media and browse through the internet smoothly
- Editing videos and rendering them with Adobe Premiere or another software
- Streaming on YouTube with OBS or another software
- FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) tasks
- ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) tasks
- CPLD (Complex Programmable Logic Devices) tasks
- SoC (Systems-On-Chip) tasks
- In-memory processes through the network on chips and systolic arrays
- AI accelerator in artificial intelligence
- Secure cryptoprocessor and cryptography accelerator in cryptography
- Network interface controller and network processor in computer networking
- The sound card in sound processing
- Field Programmable Analogue Array in analog signal processing
- GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) in computer graphics and games
Why Does It Matter?
So, apart from all the basics of hardware acceleration and when you should use it, another critical and rather popular question is why is it even important or why does it matter so much? Also, would it hurt to keep it disabled? All these questions will be answered in this section.
Hardware acceleration has the benefit of significantly improving the overall performance of your tasks. But that's not why it is so important. It matters because it has direct and indirect effects on the life and efficiency of your applications and devices. They increase your gadgets' responsiveness and battery life, ensuring that they last longer and stay in good shape. Enabling hardware acceleration when needed is essential because it keeps your hardware in check and makes sure you can get the best out of your computer.
Should It Always Be On?
As surprising as it may sound no, hardware acceleration is not always good. At some points, it's better if it is disabled. This handful of circumstances includes situations when you know your hardware acceleration is causing crashing or freezing in your browser. If you can find absolutely no other reason behind this incident, you can blame hardware acceleration and turn it off to solve the issue or can call Cox customer service number. In any other case, it is always better if you turn on the hardware acceleration.
Conclusion
Hardware acceleration is not a new idea, but it is somewhat complicated for people who have never been introduced to it or those who don't have a technical background. However, if you own a computer, a technical device, or a gadget, you must know about it as it will help you improve your experience and make the most out of your machines!
Hardware acceleration is a process that involves applications offloading specific tasks onto the hardware in your system to accelerate that task. Learn more here!
