"Hardware Acceleration" | Do you play with it on or off?

[ball2hi]

So, a lot of GUIs these days have an option to enable some sort of hardware acceleration.

I play with two monitors, both 165hz 1440p but different brands/companies and are very different panels.

In an effort to try and solve my mouse issues, I discovered that, turning on hardware acceleration in all of the apps I have open when gaming: (OBS, Chatty, Steam, Battle.net, Discord, Firefox, Spotify), seemed to dramatically impact how my game looked visually, fluidity(?) wise.

I always used to turn these off because I would go off of what the herd mentality was from Google, and as well I had different refresh-rate monitors for a while. I am curious, does anyone know what might be going on in the backend?

[K0L3N]

The purpose of hardware acceleration is to offload stuff from your CPU to your GPU.

So if you're CPU is the bottleneck, offloading things from the CPU to your GPU might help.
The reason people recommend turning it off is because they want nothing to interfere with your GPU when it comes to rendering the game. (I'm kinda hazy on the exact technical terms, but basically you want to prevent spikes of latency).

[ball2hi]

The purpose of hardware acceleration is to offload stuff from your CPU to your GPU.

So if you're CPU is the bottleneck, offloading things from the CPU to your GPU might help.
The reason people recommend turning it off is because they want nothing to interfere with your GPU when it comes to rendering the game. (I'm kinda hazy on the exact technical terms, but basically you want to prevent spikes of latency).

This is what I figured, but my CPU barely gets used up (3800X) and neither my 2080 unless I'm playing newer games but still it doesn't get fully used up. I'm not sure why offloading from my CPU (that barely is being used at all) would make my games visually look smoother. However, I don't think it helps with input lag. I think it's making it worse.

[starflame]

I play with it ON, because I have a 8700k at 5Ghz with 3200Mhz CL15 ram and a EVGA 3080, playing games at up to 240fps.

It helps when you're bottlenecked with CPU trying to reach higher framerates and your GPU is just chilling at 40%, so most games today. If I swap to a Ryzen 5900x I'll turn it off I recon.