It depends on your drivers and what particular performance problems you're seeing. I test the setting on and off with every new set of hardware I interact with. My experience has been that turning on hardware acceleration improves the smoothness of scrolling, speed of rendering, and can reduce power consumption/processor load when watching certain types of web video (not sure what kinds of hardware decoding your particular processor has).
The flip side is that sometimes hardware acceleration can lead to graphical glitches and/or general instability if your graphics hardware/driver aren't the most robust. I had an nvidia card a few years back that would produce weird artifacts and black areas with firefox when hardware accel was enabled. Similarly, I had a new skylake tablet and for the first few months the intel drivers for the integrated gpu were "not all there," and I found I had a much more stable browsing experience disabling it. Back in 2010 or 2011, enabling acceleration could actually slow firefox's loading time (on first load), but that hasn't been the case for a few years, and it was only ever an issue when you first open the browser.
So my advice (based on my own experience) is if the setting is off and things seem jerky or slow, try enabling it. If the setting is on and things seem glitchy or you're having instability try turning it off.
I generally keep it on unless I experience rendering problems. I've never gotten what I would call improved browsing performance (i.e. improved responsiveness or rendering time) from disabling the setting, but it can be helpful if you have a misbehaving driver.
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Topic: Firefox - Enable or Disable Hardware Acceleration with Integrated Graphics ? (Read 8179 times)