Hardware Graphics Acceleration

Question

As many users have noticed, there’s a new feature which is introduced in Office 2013 called "Hardware Graphics Acceleration", which sometimes is also called as "GPU rendering". The purpose of course is to improve performance.
As stated in the System Requirements for Office 2013, Graphics hardware acceleration requires a DirectX10 graphics card and a 1024 x 576 or higher resolution monitor.
A graphics processor helps increase the performance of certain features, such as drawing tables in Excel 2013 or transitions, animations, and video integration in PowerPoint 2013. Use of a graphics processor with Office 2013 requires a Microsoft DirectX
10-compliant graphics processor that has 64 MB of video memory. These processors were widely available in 2007. Most computers that are available today include a graphics processor that meets or exceeds this standard. But, if you or your users do not have
a graphics processor, you can still run Office 2013.
(http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee624351(v=office.15).aspx)
The option of hardware graphics acceleration can be found in any Office applications from
FILE -> Options -> Advanced ->
Display -> Disable hardware graphics acceleration:
This setting can be controlled by the following registry key:
Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure
that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, 
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322756
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Graphics
DWORD: DisableHardwareAcceleration
Value: 1 to disable, 0 to enable
Administrators can deploy this setting using Group Policy as well. Follow the steps below:
Warning Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly by using Registry Editor or by using another method. These problems might require that you reinstall the operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that these
problems can be solved. Modify the registry at your own risk.
1. Add the following files to your domain controller: Office15.admx and
Office15.adml files to your domain controller and then
2. In the Local Group Policy Editor, select the Miscellaneous node of the
Microsoft Office 2013 tree. This setting is shown in the following figure.
For more information about how to use .admx and .adml files for Group Policy administration, go to the following Microsoft TechNet website:
How to manage Group Policy ADMX files
Please note the change is global: Changing this option in a single Office program also applies to other remaining Office programs. So you don't need to follow these steps for all Office programs one by one. If you want to just disable animations in Word
but leave them on in Outlook, no we can’t.
When do we need to disable Hardware Graphics Acceleration?
I’ve seen in some cases users complain that Office Applications are laggy and slow, sometimes even hang/freeze. They have tried many things but couldn’t figure out the root. Actually, the animation sometimes can slow the performance down, once they disable
the Hardware Graphics Acceleration, the problem is gone.
There are also issues like blurred text/font, cursor hangs randomly in Office applications, we can disable this simple option to see if this fixes the problem.
Please note, the Hardware Graphics Acceleration option is not the only option that may cause issues. For example, an user needs to turn off the animation to improve the performance of Excel, but it doesn’t have any effects after disabling Hardware Graphics
Acceleration. Now let’s check this Windows setting:
On the Desktop, right click on This PC(or Computer) icon, select
Properties, then Advanced system settings on the left side, under
Advanced tab, click on the Settings button for
Performance.
Now we see this:
Uncheck the box for Animate controls and elements inside windows, click
OK button.
Now the problem should be gone.
Another case:
If you have blurred text/font issue in Word, you may consider to disable Hardware Graphics Acceleration. If this doesn’t help, what to do next?
Please go to FILE tab -> Options ->
Advanced -> Under Disable hardware graphics acceleration, there’s a checkbox for
Use Subpixel positioning to smooth fonts on screen, uncheck it and click
OK. The blurred text/font should be gone.
Summary
In this article I introduced how to configure Hardware Graphics Acceleration from applications, the registry and Group Policy. There are also some issues it may cause and what we should do to resolve them. If you have any ideas about this topic or any other
comment, please feel free to post in the forum, thank you.
Please click to vote if the post helps you. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Answer 1

prasoonblueluck,
Have you installed these drivers?
John B @ forum.notebookreview.com