hardware acceleration
I'm not sure I know what hardware acceleration ("…use of computer hardware to perform some function faster") is, but when I play flash games, or 3D FPS games, I'm asked if I want to use hardware acceleration.
What criteria should I mentally weigh before checking or un-checking a box?
Does hardware acceleration always refer to my graphics card?
In my case the graphic corruption disappeared after adding the parameter -Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true
The GPU is designed specifically to put graphics on the screen, taking images from specific locations, converting them to a relevant format, rendering them onto a plane along with a bunch of text and so on.
It is specifically designed to do the tasks associated with displaying pictures and text and videos and can do most of these jobs more effectively and efficiently than your CPU can. Video decoding in particular is a lot more power efficient when done using the hardware built into your graphics card as opposed to being decoded by the CPU.
In general enabling hardware accelerated graphics will result in faster page rendering and use of hardware video decoding amongst other enhancements.
That's not to say that there aren't times when it is more power efficient to have only one device (the CPU) running rather than both the CPU and GPU. In applications without heavy use of graphics disabling the GPU could effectively reduce power consumption.
Best Answer
Hardware acceleration is where certain processes - usually 3D graphics processing - is performed on specialist hardware on the graphics card (the GPU) rather than in software on the main CPU.
In general you should always enable hardware acceleration as it will result in better performance of your application. This will usually be a higher frame rate (the number of images displayed per second), and the higher the frame rate the smoother the animation.
GPU's also perform the physics calculations used in many 3D games to simulate falling objects, water, the motion of cars etc. This means that if you don't have hardware acceleration the game won't run at it's full potential or even at all.
Hardware acceleration is also used when displaying normal video, again to allow the CPU to do other things. This means you can play a video on one monitor while still working on that report on the other.
As music2myear points out, any specific purpose hardware can be used to accelerate the processing of whatever it is designed for. This can also include sound cards, but video cards are the most common and what most people will understand by the term.
So, in general, I'd say that you'd always want to enable hardware acceleration. The only time I can think of that you wouldn't would be if you were running off your laptop's battery and wanted to conserve power. Enabling it could take more juice than not having it on - but it would depend on the hardware, some specialist hardware could use less power than it would take using the more general CPU/memory/etc in the computer.
The only way to be sure would be to measure the drain on the battery with hardware acceleration on and again with it off when doing the same tasks.