Increasing application performance and stability by disabling Hardware Acceleration

Many popular desktop applications use Hardware Acceleration to improve performance. This is usually a direct improvement. However, standard desktops/laptops have built in hardware acceleration for graphics in the CPU. The vast majority of server-based CPUs, such as those found in EC2 and used by Amazon WorkSpaces and AppStream 2.0, do not have integrated GPUs. On such systems, applications will usually perform better and be more stable without hardware acceleration.

This does not apply to WorkSpaces or AppStream instances that have a dedicated GPU, such as the g4dn and g5 EC2 instances. This applies only to instances without a dedicated GPU.

Some applications allow the end user to toggle hardware acceleration off. Where possible, it's ideal to manage this automatically for end users, so their WorkSpaces or AppStream instances have these settings by default. Not all applications support fleet configuration like this, but this article will be a collection of references for programs which support this.

This list is not necessarily the full list of applications which support hardware acceleration/toggling it off. However, I will periodically update this list based on my findings/feedback I receive.

Slack has a knowledge base article for managing settings. For domain joined setups, you can use their Group Policy template. For non domain joined setups, you could bake the registry values into the image at the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Slack\Defaults registry hive. The KB article covers both possibilities.

Firefox supports managing Hardware Acceleration via Group Policy, InTune, or direct registry modification.

Chrome supports managing Hardware Acceleration via Group Policy or registry values.

Edge supports managing Hardware Acceleration via Group Policy or registry values.