Scheduling refers to how requests are processed and scheduled by your computer. Without any scheduling algorithms, it will process any request arriving first before any others, which can lead to serious instability and performance issues. To prevent this from happening, Windows has for decades used a software scheduler, which allows the processor to decide the priority of tasks and allocate different CPU cores to them, ensuring that important processes are not delayed.
Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling (HAGS) works the same way. When a game requests to generate new frames, your CPU decides the priority of the request and then passes it to your GPU for rendering. With HAGS, the CPU offloads this process to the GPU, which now handles both scheduling and rendering of everything graphics related. This gives your processor more space to handle other processes. It works differently than most other features from Nvidia and AMD that improve gaming performance. Instead of changing specific settings to configure your PC for gaming, HAGS changes how scheduling works at the operating system level. This doesn’t result in huge improvements in FPS numbers, but it streamlines your experience for more stable frame rates.
HAGS is enabled by default on Windows 11 and you can enable or disable it from Windows Settings. Open Settings by right-clicking the Windows icon in your taskbar and clicking Settings. From there, select System From the side menu, choose Displaythen select Chart. Here you can click on the Advanced graphics settings option to enable or disable hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling. Note that switching from one state to another requires restarting your computer before the change takes effect.
Should you enable or disable hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling?
Oatawa/Shutterstock
For most people with modern setups, it is recommended to enable HAGS. Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling provides improved latency and stability while also resulting in higher FPS numbers for games that benefit from it. This feature is also required if you want to use certain frame generation protocols, such as Nvidia’s DLSS frame generation, while AMD recommends enabling it for its FSR frame generation as well, although it is not a requirement. The benefit you get from enabling HAGS depends on your particular setup and what you are trying to do. Some games see virtually no improvement in frame rate, while others can perform up to 20% better. However, even if you don’t gain extra frames, hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling is known to provide more stability in FPS, making gameplay smoother and more seamless.
That said, there are cases where not only do you not get any improvement, but enabling HAGS actively degrades your computer’s performance. If you’re already running graphics-intensive games that maximize your GPU usage, enabling the feature may overload your GPU, resulting in a loss in average FPS. This is especially true for older GPUs that are not optimized for this feature. Likewise, GPUs with limited VRAM are more likely to benefit from disabling HAGS, as the feature allocates up to 1 GB of VRAM for scheduling. If you only have 8GB of VRAM and are playing a GPU-intensive game, letting HAGS consume precious VRAM can lead to instability and micro-stutters. There are also certain types of games that simply work much better without HAGS, like VR titles like “VRChat” or older games like “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.”
