Why is Hardware acceleration Disabled

[Faye]

I am wondering in PSP2023 Ultimate the hardware acceleration is disabled? What is the reason for that? What does hardware acceleration actually do? Why should we enable it?
Thank you
Faye

[LeviFiction]

Hardware acceleration is using your computer's GPU to perform calculations/effects instead of your CPU. This specifically is used for the refine brush performance. Here's the quote from the PSP help documents.

You can improve the performance of the Refine Brush by using hardware acceleration to leverage your system’s graphics processing unit (GPU). By default, hardware acceleration is disabled. To enable it, see To enable hardware acceleration.

What it doesn't say is why it's disabled by default, or why they chose to use a checkbox to disable rather than enable it. Just some really odd design choices. If I had to guess, they don't want to assume that just because you have a GPU it'll necessarily improve performance. So you have to opt-in. Though that would be easier to communicate if they just added an explanation label to that large blank page in the settings. Again, really odd design choices.