The Windows feature takes a slice of VRAM that 6GB and 8GB graphics cards can't easily spare.

If you dig through Windows 11's graphics settings, you'll come across a toggle for hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling, or HAGS, that most people never touch. It's on by default on most PCs, and is a requirement if you want to use DLSS Frame Generation. But if you're gaming on an older or cheaper card, like my grossly outdated RTX 2060 with 6GB of VRAM, or one of the many 8GB cards still on sale, it could eat VRAM your card can't spare. Mine can't these days, that's for sure!

When XDA Developers switched HAGS off on an 8GB RTX 2070 Super, it freed up nearly 950MB of graphics memory for the loss of three to five frames per second. Suddenly, textures that had been stuttering in Cyberpunk 2077 and Stellar Blade loaded properly again. That much VRAM barely matters on a card with 16GB, where there's lots of headroom, but on one with 6GB or 8GB, it can be the difference between a game running smoothly and one that runs out of memory.

Microsoft introduced HAGS in a May 2020 Windows 10 update. Before then, according to Microsoft's DirectX blog post explaining the feature, a high-priority CPU thread coordinated and scheduled all the work that programs sent to the graphics card. That slowed things down and could cause frame delays between what you did and what you saw on screen. With HAGS on, the graphics card handles most of that scheduling itself, using dedicated built-in hardware, while Windows still decides which apps go first.

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