# [QUESTION] Disable HW Overlays?



## superhawk610

With almost every ROM I've ever installed, I have to Disable HW Overlays under the Developer options. This makes me wonder, what are HW Overlays and why are they ever enabled? Disabling them only ever helps the graphic performance... Right?

Sent from my Galaxy S III running CM10.1 using Tapatalk 2


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## Soapinmouth

superhawk610 said:


> With almost every ROM I've ever installed, I have to Disable HW Overlays under the Developer options. This makes me wonder, what are HW Overlays and why are they ever enabled? Disabling them only ever helps the graphic performance... Right?
> 
> Sent from my Galaxy S III running CM10.1 using Tapatalk 2


Disabling it will hurt performance not help from what I've heard.

Sent from my liquid smooth gs3


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## razorloves

Thread moved. Please use development section for releases only. Thanks.


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## TenderloinShadow

ok, now im not an expert on this, but HW overlays has something to do with how the software uses the hardware to display graphics. By turning that off, you're turning off the option to use the HW in this way. However, since the screen flickering has had a lot of bugs with the HW overlays, you gain more than you loose by turning them off.


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## johndoe86x

I've noticed that when I turn the HW overlays off then my Youtube videos don't seem to work properly when in landscape mode.


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## superhawk610

razorloves said:


> Thread moved. Please use development section for releases only. Thanks.


Sorry, I'm new to the whole forum concept. How do I move a thread?

Sent from my Galaxy S III running CM10.1 using Tapatalk 2


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## Mustang302LX

superhawk610 said:


> Sorry, I'm new to the whole forum concept. How do I move a thread?
> 
> Sent from my Galaxy S III running CM10.1 using Tapatalk 2


He is saying he moved the thread already.


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## frankydroid

Disabling hw overlays causes most of the gui (close enough) to be ran by the cpu. With it ENABLED it forces the gpu to handle all of it, which is how it should be done. It will be slightly more choppy if you disable it, but still better than what ics was.

I sometimes disable it because I feel it slightly prolongs my battery life. But I concede that it may just be a placebo effect

Sent from my SGH-I747 using Tapatalk 2


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## swieder227

I read on Wikipedia when I had the same question. Performance will certainly be better with it enabled. I recommend against disabling it.

Hardware overlays allows the GPU to render a section of the UI separately. With it disabled, it forces the GPU to render the entirety of the interface tens of times per second.

Source

Sent from my CM10 SGS3 via Tapatalk


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