Windows 10: Disable Hardware Graphics (GPU) Acceleration to avoid Green Screen while playing videos in...

Is there a way to disable Graphics/GPU Hardware Acceleration for built-in “Movies & TV” and “Photos” apps, or, speaking more broadly, a workaround that would apply to all UWP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Windows_Platform) apps for Windows 10 downloaded from Microsoft Store?


OS: latest Windows 10 May 2019 build 1903 [Version 10.0.18362.175]


I) Problem Description and Workarounds:

1) The driver/graphics card ATI Radeon HD 4350 on my PC is incompatible with “Hardware Acceleration” feature when playing videos on Windows 10 ver. 1903.

The symptom: green screen is shown instead of videos, while audio track plays fine.

2) The problem is not unique, has existed for many years, e.g. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/musicandvideo/forum/xboxvideo/how-to-disable-hardware-acceleration-in-windows/82cae408-5885-4aa1-8d0d-76e3634248d5, https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1230977, https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/disable-hardware-acceleration-win8/956fd776-f673-49fe-9110-4defa82cee07.

3) The issue affects Internet Explorer & Edge (when playing YouTube videos), built-in “Movies & TV” and “Photos” UWP apps (when viewing video files), VLC (when playing H.264 movies).

The workaround that fixes both IE and Edge is Internet Explorer -> Internet Options -> Advanced tab -> Accelerated Graphics -> enable “Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering” (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...sable-software-rendering-in-internet-explorer).

The workaround for VLC media player is to open Tools menu -> Preferences -> Input / Codecs. Then in case of [Simple settings], set “Hardware-accelerated decoding” to Disable. In case of [All settings], go to Video codecs subcategory -> FFmpeg -> set “Hardware decoding” to Disable.

4) Buying a new graphics cards does not seem to be prudent, as quiet, fanless ATI Radeon HD 4350 fully satisfies all demands, aside from this issue; there is no need to increase waste at some landfill, when Windows 10 could just have a checkbox for UWP apps similar to the explicit one in IE/Edge, hidden one in MSOffice (see II.d below) or a registry key.


II) Troubleshooting steps that did not help:

a) Disabling an option in Photos app Settings -> “Use hardware-accelerated video encoding when available” as it does not apply to viewing/decoding.

b) Opening Windows 10 Settings -> System -> Display -> Graphics settings (link at the very bottom) -> selecting the relevant “Universal app”, then clicking the Options button does not help either, because the PC has a single ATI graphics card, so “Power saving GPU” and “High performance GPU” options both point to the same.

c) Setting HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics\DisableHWAcceleration to 1, then rebooting the system, has no effect on this problem (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/do...ltimedia/graphics-rendering-registry-settings).

d) It seems that Microsoft Office team monitors these kinds of issues (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-ie/office/troubleshoot/troubleshooting/office-display-issues): “The list of video card/video driver combinations that trigger this automatic disabling of hardware graphics acceleration is not documented because the list is hard-coded in the Office programs and will be constantly changing as we discover additional video combinations that cause problems in Office programs”. UWP team could use this data to help users “fix” Microsoft Store apps too.

e) Graphics driver data from dxdiag:

DirectX Version: DirectX 12

Card name: ATI Radeon HD 4300/4500 Series

Manufacturer: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

Chip type: ATI display adapter (0x954F)

Device Key: Enum\PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_954F&SUBSYS_E990174B&REV_00

Device Status: 0180200A [DN_DRIVER_LOADED|DN_STARTED|DN_DISABLEABLE|DN_NT_ENUMERATOR|DN_NT_DRIVER]

Device Problem Code: No Problem

Driver Name: aticfx64.dll,aticfx64.dll

Driver File Version: 8.17.0010.1129 (English)

Driver Version: 8.970.100.9001

DDI Version: 10.1

Feature Levels: 10_1,10_0,9_3,9_2,9_1

Driver Model: WDDM 1.1

(this is the latest version, “provided as a courtesy and only available via Windows Update” - https://community.amd.com/docs/DOC-1311)

Detachable GPU: No

Hybrid Graphics GPU: Not Applicable

Driver Attributes: Final Retail

Driver Date/Size: 1/13/2015 3:00:00 AM, 1094024 bytes

WHQL Logo'd: Yes

Device Identifier: {D7B71EE2-D60F-11CF-9270-9AC9BEC2C535}

Vendor ID: 0x1002

Device ID: 0x954F

SubSys ID: 0xE990174B

Revision ID: 0x0000

Driver Strong Name: oem12.inf:cb0ae4148d05d541:ati2mtag_R7X:8.970.100.9001ci\ven_1002&dev_954f

Rank Of Driver: 00D72001

Video Accel: ModeMPEG2_A ModeMPEG2_C

DXVA2 Modes: DXVA2_ModeMPEG2_IDCT DXVA2_ModeH264_VLD_NoFGT DXVA2_ModeVC1_VLD

DDraw Status: Enabled

D3D Status: Enabled

AGP Status: Enabled

As newer WDDM 1.2 introduced “video playback improvements” (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/display/d3d11-video-playback-improvements, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model#WDDM_1.2), it is possible that Green Screen hardware-accelerated video playback problem applies to all older WDDM 1.1 drivers when installed on Windows 8/10, regardless of vendor, but I do not have hardware to check this hypothesis (some evidence: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-pictures/no-video-playback-with-wddm-120-ati-drivers/47d678f7-db13-41c0-b28c-0ccfe0a4b43e). In this case it seems Microsoft could fix this by either channeling hardware-acceleration attempts to software processing on WDDM 1.1-only systems or by artificially showing hardware acceleration for video playback as unavailable to avoid Green Screens (maybe add a special checkbox for this, as did IE/Edge team).

In case anybody has an older graphics card with WDDM 1.1 driver (launch built-in dxdiag.exe, go to Display tab, see Driver Model in Drivers section), it would be interesting to see if the problem exists.

Thank you.

:)

 

How to disable hardware acceleration?


The green screen in videos happens with Flash, not video drivers. You have disable Flash Hardware acceleration in its setting when you right click on the video. If it happens with HTML5 videos, then you have to disable the web browser Hardware acceleration.

This has been an issue since 10240 came out. It is happening with both AMD & NVidia GPU's. Microsoft is aware of the issue and is still on the bug list when I pulled down 10525, which brought other headaches.

 

intel graphics & 'hardware acceleration' in chrome


It is not just for video decoding.

If you go to chrome://gpu you can see what is being accelerated.

 

Disabling hardware acceleration

Hi, I have recently upgraded to windows 10 and whenever I play a video (YouTube, Facebook, etc) the screen is green and people say that disabling hardware acceleration fixes it. But here is the thing, I don't know how to disable hardware acceleration.
I have been reading and searching many ways to but nothing helps. When it tells me to go to Control Panel>Display>Screen Resolution and click advanced setting it tells me to to go to the troubleshooting tab even though there is none. Thanks all in reply.