Five years into its existence, the Windows feature (HAGS) is causing more arguments in gaming forums than console wars. Here’s what the data actually shows.
Picture this: You spend $1,999 on NVIDIA’s flagship RTX 5090, fire up your favourite game, and discover a Windows setting that’s supposed to unlock hidden performance. One click. One restart. Instant gains, right?
Not quite. And what’s wild is that in 2025, nobody can agree on whether Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) is a game-changer or a game-breaker.
The Shocking Reality: Fresh 2025 Benchmarks Tell a Different Story
Let’s cut through the noise with hard numbers from FrameSync Labs’ January 2025 testing—the most recent comprehensive benchmark available. The results? Underwhelming doesn’t begin to describe it.
- Average FPS gain: +0.3%
- 1% low improvement: +1.6%
- 0.2% low improvement: 0%
These aren’t rounding errors. This is the actual performance delta after five years of refinement. If you blinked during your gaming session, you literally wouldn’t notice the difference.
But here’s where it gets interesting—and controversial.
The DLSS Frame Generation Bombshell
Here’s something NVIDIA doesn’t advertise prominently: If you own an RTX 40 or 50 series GPU and want to use DLSS 3 or DLSS 4 Frame Generation, HAGS isn’t optional. It’s mandatory.
According to testing from multiple sources including CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 documentation and community reports, Frame Generation simply won’t activate without HAGS enabled.
This has created a bizarre situation where users are forced to enable a feature that might actually hurt their performance in some titles just to access another feature they paid premium money for.
One Reddit user with an RTX 4090 reported a 10-20% performance improvement after disabling HAGS while playing Horizon Forbidden West—but couldn’t use Frame Generation as a result.
The choice becomes: enable HAGS and deal with potential stuttering, or disable it and lose access to DLSS 3/4’s headline feature.
Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The Hidden VRAM Trap That’s Destroying Budget Builds
Here’s the bombshell that manufacturers conveniently forget to mention: HAGS can consume an additional 1GB of VRAM.
For users rocking GPUs with 8GB or less—like the widely criticized RTX 5060 Ti 8GB or RTX 4060—this isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s potentially catastrophic. Multiple users across Steam forums and Reddit have reported stuttering, texture pop-in, and outright crashes when HAGS is enabled on VRAM-limited cards.
One user testing the RTX 5060 Ti 8GB noted that with HAGS enabled, modern titles at 1440p would frequently exceed available VRAM, causing system memory to be used as overflow.
Since system RAM operates at significantly slower speeds than GDDR7, this creates micro-stutters and frame pacing issues that make games feel worse despite similar average framerates.
The kicker? Windows 11 enables HAGS by default on fresh installs. Thousands of budget-conscious gamers are unknowingly handicapping their already-limited GPUs.
After Effects: The One Application Where HAGS Actually Delivers
Amid the sea of disappointing gaming benchmarks, there’s one standout success story: Adobe After Effects.
According to Puget Systems’ extensive 2023 testing (results that remain consistent in 2025), After Effects users saw performance increases of 3-10% with HAGS enabled. That’s a significant boost for professional workflows where every second of render time translates to billable hours or faster project delivery.
Interestingly, other creative applications showed mixed results. Blender GPU rendering improved by about 5%, while V-Ray RTX actually lost approximately 5% performance.
The pattern suggests HAGS benefits applications with specific GPU scheduling characteristics—but predicting which applications will benefit remains frustratingly unpredictable.
Performance Impact of HAGS: On vs Off
We tested leading NVIDIA and AMD GPUs that support HAGS with the feature both enabled and disabled. The results below show the measured differences in average FPS and 1% low performance—select your GPU brand and toggle HAGS ON or OFF to compare the data.
⚡ HAGS Bottleneck Calculator
Should YOU enable Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling? Find out in 60 seconds.
Select all that apply:
Windows 11 vs Windows 10: The Default Setting Controversy
Here’s a critical detail that’s causing confusion: Windows 11 enables HAGS by default on fresh installations, while Windows 10 leaves it disabled.
This means millions of users upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11 are unknowingly getting a fundamentally different GPU scheduling system.
For some, this means slightly improved frame pacing. For others—particularly those with older CPUs or limited VRAM—it means random crashes and degraded performance.
Multiple reports from OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) users indicate that HAGS can cause encoder failures and stream stability issues. OBS’s official documentation now recommends disabling HAGS as a first troubleshooting step for hardware encoding problems.
The Chaos Recommendation: When the Pros Speak
V-Ray GPU product specialist Muhammed Hamed from Chaos provided one of the most technical explanations for when HAGS actually helps.
According to internal testing shared in the Chaos forums, HAGS allows V-Ray GPU to access more VRAM on rendering devices by reducing the amount Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) reserves.
This is the first concrete technical explanation for why HAGS benefits some workflows but not others. It’s not about raw performance—it’s about VRAM management.
For rendering professionals using multiple GPUs, this matters. For gamers? Not so much.
The Real-World Performance Matrix: Who Benefits, Who Suffers
After analysing thousands of user reports, benchmark data, and professional testing, here’s the brutal truth about who should enable HAGS in 2025:
Enable HAGS if you:
- Own an RTX 40/50 series and want DLSS Frame Generation (no choice)
- Use Adobe After Effects professionally
- Work with V-Ray GPU rendering on multi-GPU setups
- Have a CPU-limited system with excess VRAM (12GB+)
- Play at high refresh rates (120Hz+) and notice input lag
Disable HAGS immediately if you:
- Have 8GB VRAM or less
- Experience stuttering or crashes in games
- Use OBS for streaming or recording
- Run multiple monitors with different refresh rates
- Notice increased input lag in competitive games
Test both settings if you:
- Have 12-16GB VRAM
- Use a mix of gaming and creative work
- Experience inconsistent frame pacing
- Run VR applications
The 2026 Outlook: What’s Actually Changing
NVIDIA’s RTX 50 series launch in January 2025 introduced DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, which generates up to three additional frames per rendered frame.
Early adopters discovered that not only does this require HAGS, but the feature can multiply performance by up to 8x in specific scenarios.
However, there’s a catch. Frame Warp technology in DLSS 4 updates rendered frames based on the latest mouse input right before display—a process that’s latency-sensitive.
Some users report that while framerate multiplies dramatically, the subjective feeling of responsiveness doesn’t match raw FPS numbers.
AMD’s approach with FSR 3 notably doesn’t require HAGS, giving AMD users more flexibility. This has sparked debates about whether NVIDIA’s architectural dependence on HAGS is a technical necessity or an artificial limitation.
The Memory Crisis Wild Card
Here’s something that could completely upend HAGS adoption in 2026: the ongoing GDDR7 shortage.
Memory prices increased 246% in 2025, and supply constraints are hitting GPUs with 16GB+ configurations hardest. Japan is already rationing GPUs with 16GB or more VRAM.
If this trend continues, more users will be forced onto 8GB variants—exactly the VRAM tier where HAGS causes the most problems.
NVIDIA is reportedly cutting RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5060 Ti 16GB production by 30-40%, redirecting GDDR7 allocation to more profitable AI-focused products. This means budget and mid-range gamers are increasingly stuck with VRAM-limited cards where HAGS becomes a liability.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Testing
Most HAGS benchmarks suffer from a critical flaw: they test in isolation. But real-world usage involves dozens of background processes, varying system memory speeds, different driver versions, and workload combinations that benchmarking suites can’t replicate.
A user with Discord, Spotify, Chrome with 47 tabs, and RGB control software running will have a fundamentally different HAGS experience than someone running a clean system with only their game active.
This explains why anecdotal reports vary so wildly. One user swears HAGS reduced stuttering in their favorite game. Another experiences crashes they can’t explain. Both are telling the truth—their systems are just different enough that HAGS behaves differently.
The Bottom Line: Testing Beats Trusting
After reviewing every major benchmark from 2020 to 2025, analyzing hundreds of user reports, and examining the technical documentation, here’s the reality: HAGS in 2025 is a feature you should test yourself rather than blindly enable or disable.
The performance delta is simply too small and too workload-dependent to offer universal guidance. What works flawlessly on a 13900K/RTX 4090 combo might cause constant headaches on a Ryzen 5 5600X/RTX 5060 Ti system.
Your action plan:
- Note your current performance metrics (average FPS, 1% lows, frame time variance)
- Toggle HAGS in Settings → System → Display → Graphics
- Restart your PC (this is mandatory)
- Test the same scenarios for at least a week
- Track not just FPS, but perceived smoothness and stability
- Make your decision based on your specific hardware and workload
The Feature Microsoft Won’t Fix
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of HAGS is that Microsoft has shown little interest in addressing its inconsistency.
The feature hit Windows in May 2020 and has seen minimal refinement since. Driver updates from NVIDIA and AMD carry more weight for HAGS performance than anything Microsoft has done at the OS level.
This suggests Microsoft views HAGS as “good enough”—a checkbox feature that satisfies architectural requirements for technologies like DLSS Frame Generation without requiring ongoing optimization.
For users, this means HAGS will likely remain in its current “sometimes helpful, sometimes harmful” state for the foreseeable future.
The Final Verdict for 2025-2026
Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling isn’t the performance silver bullet its name suggests. It’s a niche optimization that helps specific workflows, is mandatory for certain features, and causes problems for others.
The gaming performance gains are statistically insignificant—so small that the placebo effect likely accounts for many positive reports. The creative application benefits are real but application-specific. The VRAM overhead is a genuine problem for budget builds.
Most importantly, the feature highlights a broader industry trend: GPU technologies are becoming increasingly complex and workload-dependent. The days of universal optimisation guidelines are fading. The era of “test it yourself on your specific setup” is here.
That’s not the viral takeaway people want. They want a simple “turn it on” or “turn it off” answer. But five years of data across thousands of configurations tells us: there isn’t one.
The only universal truth about HAGS in 2025? If you’re being forced to enable it for DLSS Frame Generation, you’re not imagining the extra layer of complexity NVIDIA just added to your gaming experience.
Still experiencing performance issues? Before blaming HAGS, check your driver version, monitor your VRAM usage, and verify Windows power plan settings. More often than not, HAGS is a scapegoat for problems originating elsewhere in your system.
