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Use your graphics card

The AI tools here — upscaling, background removal, transcription — run on your GPU, in your browser. On many laptops Windows quietly hands browsers the slow integrated GPU while the discrete card sits idle. One setting fixes that.

1 Windows setting · ~2 minutes · nothing to install · 0 uploads

What is going on

Two GPUs, and the browser was given the small one.

Hybrid laptops carry two GPUs

An integrated GPU lives inside the processor and sips battery; the discrete card — NVIDIA or AMD — is many times larger and does the heavy lifting. Both are real, and Windows decides per app which one an application sees.

Browsers default to the small one

Windows assigns browsers to the power-saving GPU by default, and a web page cannot reach past that: the browser can only offer this site the GPU it was itself given. That is why the device chip on a tool page can show an Intel name on a machine with an NVIDIA card in it.

The fix

Tell Windows to give your browser the discrete card.
  1. Open the graphics settings. Settings › System › Display › Graphics. On Windows 10 the same screen is called "Graphics settings" at the bottom of the Display page.
  2. Add your browser. Click Add an app (Desktop app › Browse) and pick your browser — for Chrome that is usually C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe, for Edge C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe. If it is already listed, select it.
  3. Pick High performance. Open the browser’s Options on that screen and choose High performance — that is the discrete card. Save.
  4. Relaunch and check. Close the browser completely, reopen it, and load any AI tool. The device chip in the tool’s top bar should now name your card and read “Ready · GPU”.

The NVIDIA Control Panel (Manage 3D Settings › Program Settings) and AMD Software set the same preference per app — use whichever you prefer; the Windows setting wins when both are set.

Check it worked

Open any AI tool — the image upscaler is a good test — and click the device chip in the editor’s top bar. It should name your card under High performance. If both GPUs are now visible to the browser, the chip’s menu also offers the choice directly.

Still showing the integrated name? Fully quit the browser first (not just the tab). After that, check chrome://gpu and your graphics driver version — some laptop configurations pin the browser regardless, and that is set below the level any website can see.

What gets faster

The tools that run a model — everything else was already quick.

Either way, nothing changes about privacy: on the integrated GPU, the discrete card, or the CPU fallback, every file is processed on your device and never uploaded.