Question Microsoft removing/ed? the 'disable hardware acceleration' option from MS Office?

[mikeymikec]

I'm really puzzled by this one. I've corrected graphics rendering issues in Microsoft Office in the past by opening up say Word's advanced options and disabling hardware acceleration, and I did as recently as a month or two ago (though it may have been an older version, 2013 and later all look pretty similar).

However, a customer contacted me with Office-specific rendering issues, and as I thought I'd be able to just tell them over the phone to go there, tick that box and done, I fired up a Win10 VM to check exactly where and how the option is labelled in Word 2021, but the option has disappeared.

When I googled for this, there are pages that are years old complaining that the option was removed, and various quotes from Microsoft along the lines of "we didn't like that sometimes people gave out duff information that included disabling this option, so we removed it altogether" and "just disable graphics hardware acceleration universally in Windows!".

One alternate solution is a registry tweak but with 2021 it appears to do nothing (despite that 2021 is still saving its settings into the '16.0' key structure, which I found amusing).

 

[Steltek]

Just yet another example of Microsoft believing their own press over listening to their customers. I'm surprised at this point that Microsoft even admits that they have customers, considering that they treat most of them as indentured serfs instead.

It is their entire business model, now.

 

[igor_kavinski]

When I googled for this, there are pages that are years old complaining that the option was removed, and various quotes from Microsoft along the lines of "we didn't like that sometimes people gave out duff information that included disabling this option, so we removed it altogether" and "just disable graphics hardware acceleration universally in Windows!".

Only solution in case the customer wants to stick with Office 2021 seems to be uninstalling the GPU driver and prevent it from being installed by Windows Update so the GPU 2D pipeline will run in software mode using Microsoft's basic display adapter. This is if the customer is ok with the slight sluggishness of such a basic display mode. Strictly only doable for office PCs that will be used for productivity software only. It would be interesting to know which CPU is best suited for such a use case. Will the highest speed CPU help or can something like the Ryzen X3D accelerate the software 2D driver?

 

[igor_kavinski]

I'm surprised at this point that Microsoft even admits that they have customers, considering that they treat most of them as indentured serfs instead.

Yeah. Back in the day, people got fired for daring to be different with Windows 8 but so far, it seems that Satya Nadella loves his Windows division shamelessly trying to copy the MacOS UI and not doing a good job with the animations and smoothness. It feels annoyingly different in a bad way for someone coming from Windows 10.